About the RDM Packet Decoder Online Tool

RDM Packet Decoder Online is an independent engineering page. It exists so someone who already has a HEX dump of an ANSI E1.20 Remote Device Management packet can name the fields, split the UID, and see whether the checksum matches. It is not a product of ESTA, not a licensed copy of the ANSI E1.20 standard, and not a substitute for the published document. If you need normative text, buy the standard.

The parser is original TypeScript written for this site. Layout constants, additive checksums, Discovery Unique Branch nibble encoding, and the small standard-PID table are implemented here and covered by Vitest. Reference implementations that are MIT or Apache licensed were read for orientation only. This codebase does not copy 50x.ca, rdm-app, Wireshark dissectors, or OLA. Manufacturer PID names are not scraped from Open Lighting Architecture. Unknown and manufacturer-range PIDs stay as raw hexadecimal.

Scope is deliberate and narrow. The supported dialect is ANSI E1.20-2010. The page will not claim that E1.20-2025 is complete. It will not speak Art-Net or sACN. It will not open a USB widget, sniff a cable, or unwrap an ENTTEC USB PRO envelope that starts 0x7E and ends 0xE7 — those dumps are flagged and left closed. Concatenated leftovers after a finished frame are errors, not a silent first-26-byte parse. Those limits are the editorial policy: show what this decoder actually does, and refuse the rest.

Editorial refresh follows the parser, not a news cycle. When a checksum rule, DUB collision message, or PID label changes in code, the tool page should describe the same behavior. There is no separate content team and no user-generated comments. Examples on the decoder (including Load Example) are generated from the same encoder the tests use, so they are not decorative HEX.

This is not an official RDM stack, not a controller, and not affiliated with fixture vendors named in sample dumps. Sample UIDs in examples are synthetic. If a manufacturer ID appears in a paste you supply, that is your capture, not an endorsement. The page also does not host the ANSI PDF, does not provide legal advice about the standard, and does not certify that a fixture is E1.20 compliant just because a checksum passed on a single GET IDENTIFY.

Why a dedicated About page exists: reviewers and operators should see who writes the decoder, what the parser will not do, and that manufacturer dictionaries were not imported from another project. The homepage explains the job. The tool page explains fields against running code. This page states the editorial limits in one place so they are not only buried in FAQ answers. If a future change adds a PID name, it will be typed into the hand-maintained table, not pulled from a scrape.

This site is published at rdmpacket.com. The parser still runs only in the browser. Reach the operator at contact@rdmpacket.com.

Use the decoder for HEX inspection, read Privacy for how dumps are handled, and see Contact for how to reach the operator.