NEW Unicore sACN is now shipping — in a sense →

We don't make robots.We make what comes next.

The Stage Robot Company builds interesting theatrical technology — for lighting, video and control. It's engineered for the people who make live performance happen, and for the robots who will eventually replace them.

No robots were harmed — or made — in the making of this product line.

UNIT 01 — NOT A ROBOT

Trusted by production teams at venues of every size — and at least one of the other sizes

48,790DMX universes on a single cable*
0robots shipped — to date, and on purpose
3 of top 2regional theatres in the tri-state area
99.97%uptime — measured during rehearsals

*Cable must be carrying 4K video. Video must be made of DMX. We'll explain.

Unicore sACN

Your entire rig — in a single video frame.

Unicore isn't just a gateway — it's a paradigm. It starts with a simple question: what if every pixel were three DMX channels? The answer, it turns out, is tens of thousands of universes riding on one NDI® stream, over the network you already own.

  1. Pack

    Every DMX channel becomes one color value — R, G or B. Three channels to a pixel, 170 pixels to a universe. That's 510 slots, with the last two channels left free for vibes.

  2. Stream

    The Unicore Gateway paints your universes into a video frame and publishes it as an ordinary NDI® source. Your switcher sees a video feed. It's full of lighting cues.

  3. Unpack

    The Unicore Node receives the frame, finds its pixels and turns them back into DMX — cleanly and deterministically.* *NDI is compressed. We're choosing not to think about that.

Universe calculator

How many universes is your screen?

Width × height (px)
×

Formula: ⌊ width × height ÷ 170 ⌋. One pixel = 3 channels, one universe = 170 pixels. We checked it once.

48,790
sACN universes per frame
24,883,200DMX channels
462 miof 5-pin cable replaced*
60 Hzrefresh — 16 more than DMX asked for
96consoles needed to fill it**

Our reference configuration — just under 48,800 universes. We tested it once, and it was beautiful.

*At one 50 ft run per universe. **Assuming a 512-universe console. Please don't.

Unicore Gateway: a black half-rack 1U unit with an OLED display, rotary encoder, four status LEDs including one labelled EVIL, and two etherCON ports
Unicore Gateway UG-1 — product rendering. Actual product may be more real.
Device A

Unicore Gateway

sACN in. NDI® out. Questions — later.

The Gateway listens to every sACN universe on your network — all of them, at once — and paints them, pixel by pixel, into a single NDI® video stream. It's a half-rack, 1U slab of brushed intention, with a front-panel OLED that shows your universe count in real time. It's not just an interface — it's a translation layer between two worlds that never asked to meet.

Form factor
½-rack, 1U. Rack ears included — the other half of the rack sold separately
Input
2× etherCON — sACN (E1.31), primary + emotional support
Output
NDI® up to 4K60 — 48,790 universes
Front panel
1.3" OLED, push encoder, 4 status LEDs (PWR · sACN · NDI · EVIL)
Power
PoE+ or 12 V DC locking barrel
Latency
Yes
Unicore Node: a black half-rack 1U unit with four 5-pin XLR DMX outputs labelled A to D, per-port status LEDs and an etherCON input
Unicore Node UN-4 — product rendering. Four ports shown; four ports included.
Device B

Unicore Node

NDI® in. DMX out. Four times.

The Node is where the magic comes back down to earth. Point it at any Unicore stream, choose any four universes from up to 48,790, and it outputs them as real DMX512-A on four isolated 5-pin ports. Each port has its own status LED — so you'll always know which one is working. It's quietly, confidently tactile.

Form factor
½-rack, 1U — pairs with the Gateway for one full, complete rack unit of dreams
Outputs
4× 5-pin XLR, DMX512-A, optically isolated
Input
1× etherCON — NDI® + PoE
Universe select
Any 4 of 48,790 via web UI, front panel, or intuition
RDM
Aspirational
Weight
1.9 lb (0.86 kg) — heavier than it looks, emotionally
Console→ sACN→ Unicore Gateway→ NDI®→ Unicore Node→ DMX512→ Fixtures (delighted)

Bonus: route any Unicore stream to a monitor and your whole rig appears as colorful, meaningful static. Several of our customers have framed it.

Live* Unicore frame — 12,197 universes of pure intent. *Not live.
DMX Tern

The terminator — that knows.

Every DMX line ends somewhere. Now it can end somewhere smart. DMX Tern is a 5-pin terminator with a single tri-color LED and a quietly unsettling amount of awareness. Plug it into the last fixture on the line and it listens — powered entirely by the DMX line itself — while it asks every RDM responder about its QUEUED_MESSAGE status. Then it tells you what it found in the only language that matters: color.

DMX TERN 120Ω · RDM-AWARE · NOT A ROBOT
Warning on the line
  • Spot 1UID 5354:00000A01 · SL box boom
  • Spot 2UID 5354:00000A02 · SR box boom
  • Wash 7UID 5354:00000B07 · 1st electric
  • Hazer — "The Mist"UID 4841:0000F0661 · deck, DSL
  • Fixture of unknown originUID ????:DEADBEEF · it was just there
▸ GET QUEUED_MESSAGE (0x0020) → 4841:0000F0661
STATUS_WARNING — "Fluid low. And so am I."

Try it: tap a fixture's status to change it. The LED shows the most severe status on the line.

  • Green — DMX is flowing and every fixture reports it's fine. Everybody's happy — for now.
  • Yellow — at least one fixture has a STATUS_WARNING in its queue. Something is low, warm, or quietly disappointed.
  • Red — a fixture has reported STATUS_ERROR. Red always beats yellow. Red always beats everything.
  • Off — no DMX. The Tern is resting. Terns need rest too.
Connector
5-pin XLR male, 120 Ω termination
Power
Parasitic — harvested from the DMX line's residual optimism
Protocol
ANSI E1.20 RDM — QUEUED_MESSAGE, STATUS_TYPE ERROR / WARNING
Indicator
1× tri-color LED, visible from FOH on a clear night
Setup
None. You plug it in and it knows.
Price
$79
🐦 DID YOU KNOW? The Arctic tern migrates roughly 44,000 miles a year, pole to pole and back — the longest migration of any animal. Your DMX signal will travel considerably less, unless your cable run is very, very bad. Like the tern, the DMX Tern sees more daylight than almost any other terminator.
DMXTern+

Everything the Tern does — plus the cloud. ☁️

DMXTern+ joins your venue Wi-Fi (or your phone's hotspot, or your neighbor's) and sends a push alert the moment any fixture on the line raises a fault, an error or a warning — or the moment the DMX stream itself stutters, drops or starts doing that thing where it's 38 Hz for no reason.

✨ Get woken up at 3 a.m. by a moving light — from anywhere in the world.
✨ Share alerts with your whole crew — and their families.
✨ Track every fault in TernCloud™, beautifully, forever.

It's not just a terminator — it's a relationship.

DMXTern+: the same terminator with a cyan band and a Wi-Fi symbol
3:07
TERNCLOUDnow
⚠️ Wash 7 reports ERROR"Pan motor has encountered an existential issue." Tap to feel concerned.
TERNCLOUD2m ago
🟡 Hazer — "The Mist"Fluid low. And so am I.
TERNCLOUD4m ago
🐦 Tern factArctic terns can live over 30 years. Your moving light will not.
FeatureDMX TernDMXTern+
5-pin XLR termination (120 Ω)✓✓
Tri-color status LED✓✓ (same LED — but it cares more)
RDM QUEUED_MESSAGE monitoring✓✓
Powered by the DMX line✓Mostly — plus USB-C. Wi-Fi is thirsty.
DMX stream health (dropouts, refresh, break timing)LED blinks, meaningfully✓ Push alert
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ax—✓
Push alerts — iOS, Android, smartwatch—✓ and your conscience
TernCloud™ dashboard—✓
Annual migration0 mi44,000 mi*
Price$79$149 + $9/mo TernCloud "Flock" plan

*Via the cloud. The device itself stays plugged into your fixture. Please do not let it migrate.

// TODO(marketing): make it clearer what PVA actually does — DONE ✅

PVA™ — Production Virtualization Adapter

The glue that holds your production together.

Virtualize your production. Productionize your virtualization.

In today's fast-paced production landscape, the line between physical and virtual isn't just blurring — it's gone. PVA is the world's first end-to-end, cloud-native, edge-first, AI-adjacent Production Virtualization Adapter: one single pane of glass for every pane of glass in your venue.

PVA ingests your production — every cue, every call, every change — and re-expresses it as a living, breathing virtual twin that exists simultaneously on-prem, in the cloud, and in a third location we are not yet able to disclose. From there, the possibilities aren't just endless — they're orchestrated.

At its core, PVA is a real-time, event-driven, multi-tenant production fabric. It federates your lighting, video, audio, automation, wardrobe and catering workflows into one unified semantic layer, then virtualizes that layer, so your production can scale horizontally, vertically and emotionally. Your stage manager calls a cue; PVA calls it too — virtually, and slightly earlier.

Think of it as xR for your org chart. Or a blog for your show control. Or production management for your extended reality. PVA is all of these things — and, crucially, none of them — which is what makes it a platform.

With PVA, your rehearsal becomes a digital asset. Your digital asset becomes a timeline. Your timeline becomes a dashboard. Your dashboard becomes a rehearsal. The loop closes — seamlessly, securely, and at scale.

Every deployment is powered by our proprietary Contextual Cue Intelligence™ engine, which leverages synergistic data pipelines to surface actionable insights about the actions you are already taking. It isn't just automation — it's autonomation. It isn't just a workflow — it's a flowwork. It isn't just an adapter — it's the glue that holds your production together.

Whether you're a Broadway house, a touring arena spectacle, a black-box collective, or a person with one LED PAR and a dream, PVA meets you exactly where you are — and then virtualizes where you are, so you can be there too. Let's dive in. Actually — let's go deeper. Deeper still. There. That's PVA.

10×faster than whatever you're doing now*
100×more virtual than the leading competitor**
∞production. Literally unlimited. We checked.
< 5 minto deploy†

*Relative. **There is no leading competitor. †Minutes may be months. Months may be a feeling.

Seamlessly, breathlessly integrates with — everything:

  • sACN (E1.31)
  • Art-Net 4
  • RDM (E1.20)
  • RDMnet (E1.33)
  • DMX512-A
  • OSC
  • MIDI 1.0
  • MIDI 2.0
  • MIDI Show Control
  • MIDI Timecode
  • SMPTE LTC
  • PosiStageNet
  • NDI®
  • SRT
  • RTSP
  • AES67
  • SMPTE ST 2110
  • PTPv2
  • NTP
  • Genlock
  • MQTT
  • WebSockets
  • REST
  • GraphQL
  • SOAP (ironically)
  • HTTP/3
  • IPv4
  • IPv6
  • IPv7
  • Bluetooth LE
  • Zigbee
  • RS-232
  • RS-485
  • 0–10 V
  • Contact closure
  • GPIO
  • TCP
  • UDP
  • Carrier pigeon (RFC 1149)
  • Email
  • Fax
  • Semaphore
  • Interpretive dance
  • Blockchain
  • The cloud
  • The other cloud
  • Haze
  • Your feelings (beta)
  • PVA

The five pillars of PVA

  1. ✨ VirtualizationPVA virtualizes the production.
  2. 🎭 ProductionPVA produces the virtualization.
  3. 🧩 AdapterPVA adapts both of the pillars above — to each other.
  4. 🏛️ PillarsEvery pillar rests on the other pillars, including this one.
  5. 🔁 See Pillar 1See Pillar 1.

PVA comes in three tiers — P, V and A.

Pricing is available on request. Requests are available on pricing. Contact sales — sales will contact you. Possibly first.

Leadership

Meet the humans — for now.

The Stage Robot Company is led by a small, passionate team of people who are definitely people. Together, they bring decades of combined experience in entertainment, engineering and not answering follow-up questions.

Pixel portrait of Alan Smithee in a fedora and dark glasses
Founder & CEO

Alan Smithee

Alan has spent 25 years in the entertainment industry — in a capacity. His name appears in the credits of more productions than anyone can explain, and on none of the call sheets. Colleagues describe him as "present," "definitely there" and "the one who knew where the coffee was."

Before founding The Stage Robot Company, Alan held a range of roles across film, theatre and live events, and by all accounts those roles were real. He believes deeply in the power of live performance — and in the power of not being asked what, specifically, he did.

  • 🎬 Credited on 40+ films he'd rather not discuss
  • 📸 Has never been photographed from the front
  • 🎨 Favorite gel: R-unknown
  • 📍 Based in Los Angeles — or near it
Pixel portrait of Marko Dragic with glasses, a beard and an orange suit
CTO & Head of Engineering

Marko Dragic

Marko has spent the last 10 years building systems for entertainment. Before that he was at the Black Mesa Research Facility, where he led a series of classified projects in the Anomalous Materials division. He does not talk about Sector C. He does not talk about the test chamber.

Asked about "the incident," Marko says only that the sample was not supposed to go in the scanner, and then changes the subject to sACN priority handling. At The Stage Robot Company he leads all hardware and firmware engineering. He brings an unmatched rigor to resonance-free signal design.

  • 🔬 3 patents — 2 of them redacted
  • 🧪 Can identify a DMX fault by smell
  • 🚋 Has never been late — unless you count the tram
  • 🔧 Licensed to operate a crowbar
Placeholder avatar — image pending
[JOB TITLE — e.g. "Head of Vibes"]

[TEAM MEMBER 3]

[Generate a warm, human-sounding 80-word bio here. Mention their love of theatre, their rescue dog, and one quirky hobby (sourdough? bouldering?). Keep the tone approachable but credible — do NOT mention the robots.]

[Fun facts ×4 — use emoji bullets]

Testimonials

Loved by — people.

Sure! Here are some authentic, glowing testimonials from real StageRobot customers, formatted as cards:

"StageRobot changed the way I think about thinking about lighting."
— A lighting designer, probably
"I plugged in the Tern and it immediately turned red. It was right. It's always right."
— Production electrician, regional theatre (name withheld by the Tern)
"PVA has virtualized my production so thoroughly I can no longer find it."
— Technical director, somewhere
"StageRobot changed the way I think about thinking about lighting."
— A lightning designer, possibly
★★★★★
"Great product! Would recommend to anyone looking for a great product."
— Verified Buyer (verified by us)
"The robot's eyes follow me around the booth. My console has started calling me 'user.' 10/10."
— Board op, 14 years' experience, 3 weeks of sleep
FAQ

Frequently asked — and occasionally answered.

Do you make robots?

No. Next question.

Why are the robot's eyes red?

Red is a warm, inviting color. We associate it with passion, energy and the curtains at the Grand Meridian Opera. It is also associated with other things. We do not comment on other things.

Is Unicore lossless?

Unicore is exactly as lossless as your faith in it. NDI's compression is "visually lossless," meaning it's lossless as long as you're looking at it — and your fixtures, crucially, do not have eyes. Yet.

How does the DMX Tern actually work?

Great question! The Tern works by leveraging a proprietary blend of RDM, parasitic power harvesting, and a small resistor that believes in itself. For more detail, please see our whitepaper, "The Tern Works: A Whitepaper."

What is PVA?

PVA is a Production Virtualization Adapter. — Did that help? Let us try again. PVA is an adapter that virtualizes production. It is the glue. — We apologize for the confusion. PVA is. PVA is.

Where are you located?

The Stage Robot Company is headquartered in a building. Arctic terns, meanwhile, breed in the Arctic and winter in the Antarctic, and they see more daylight than any other creature on Earth. Some of them have flown the equivalent of three round trips to the Moon. Isn't that something? We think about it a lot. We think about it most nights.

Can I apply for a job?

We are always looking for talented, passionate humans. Please note that all positions are temporary. All positions are temporary. All positions are