Issue 01: ETC’s F-Drive RX takes the drivers out of the ceiling

Centralized LED drivers in a 2U rack, power to the fixture over Cat cable, and a UL 924 emergency bypass in the same box. What it changes, and where it does not fit.

August 25, 2026 by

For most of the last decade, the argument about LED drivers has been about where they fail, not where they sit. They sit above the ceiling, behind the fixture, in the plenum — and when one goes, somebody brings a lift into a occupied space and opens the ceiling.

ETC’s F-Drive RX proposes something else: put every driver in a rack in a back-of-house room, and run low-voltage power out to the fixtures over Category cable. It is not a new idea in principle. What is new is the completeness of the implementation, and one specification line in particular that I will come to.

What it actually is

A 2U rack-mount enclosure taking up to ten hot-swappable output cards, driving up to 2800 W across as many as 80 channels. Input is 56 VDC from a separate power supply, so the enclosure itself carries no line voltage to the fixtures. Output leaves on RJ45 and runs to the luminaire on Category cable, up to 100 m (328 ft), on 23 AWG or heavier conductors.

The cards are where the flexibility sits, and they can go in any slot:

CC 8 — constant current, eight individually addressable channels, 200–700 mA adjustable per channel, output voltage regulating itself between 3 and 56 VDC. 32.5 W per channel, 240 W per card.
FTW 8 — fade to warm, eight channels, for the ArcSystem Navis fade-to-warm luminaires.
C24V — constant voltage, four channels of 24 VDC at up to 65 W per channel. This is the one that matters for third-party product and LED tape, and ETC says so plainly.
Chroma 16 and ArcLamp 4 — both listed as available soon rather than shipping. Worth knowing before you specify around them.

Control is two universes of DMX512 on three-pin, or sACN over Ethernet on a single RJ45. Configuration is either at the front panel on a colour UI, or in ETC Concert loaded over the front USB port. Five-year warranty.

The line that makes this interesting

The F-Drive RX is cULus Listed to UL 924 as well as UL 2108, and carries an emergency control bypass with load shedding, triggered by a contact closure that can be configured wet or dry.

Read that again in the context of a real job. On a conventional installation, emergency egress lighting means a separate emergency device — an inverter, a UL924 relay or a bypass unit — sitting somewhere near the fixtures it serves, on its own circuit, with its own commissioning and its own annual test. Here it is a configuration setting on a rack you can walk up to, and the same fixture serves the normal look and the emergency look.

Load shedding is the part specifiers should look at hardest. In an emergency the system can drop non-essential channels and hold the egress channels up, which is what lets a modest battery or inverter carry a much larger installation than it otherwise could. That is a real cost line, not a feature bullet.

What changes on site

Service stops being a construction event. A failed driver becomes a card pulled out of the front of a rack while the rest of the system keeps running. No lift, no ceiling opened, no occupied space closed off.
The high-voltage work concentrates. Line voltage stops at the power supply. Everything downstream is Class 2 low voltage, which changes who is allowed to touch it and removes lockout/tagout from routine maintenance — ETC makes this point explicitly and it is the strongest practical argument for the architecture.
The rough-in gets cheaper and the coordination gets harder. Cat cable instead of conduit and line-voltage homeruns is a real saving. It is also a pathway that has to be drawn, budgeted and pulled by somebody, and 100 m is a hard ceiling including every leg.
Channel count stops being a luxury. Eighty individually addressable channels in 2U changes how granular a lighting scheme can be without the control budget being the thing that stops it.

There is an accessory worth knowing about here: the S-Box takes a single constant-current channel and serially connects up to three luminaires from it, with a thru for the unused channels. It is how you get the fixture count up without buying more cards, and it works with third-party constant-current loads in the 200–700 mA range, not just ETC product. The 100 m limit is the total path — enclosure to S-Box plus S-Box to luminaire — not per leg.

Where it does not fit

A briefing that only lists benefits is a press release. The constraints are real and they rule out a good deal of South Florida work:

IP-20, dry locations only, 0–40°C. This is an indoor, conditioned-space product. It is not going in a garage, a soffit, or anywhere it might see humidity outside the 5–95% non-condensing band. For a market where a great deal of the interesting lighting is outdoors and coastal, that matters.
Class 2 means Class 2. Outputs must not be bussed or bridged. Combining them to chase a bigger load exceeds the Class 2 limits that the entire safety argument rests on.
It needs a home. Two rack units plus a power supply, with forced-air cooling, left to right, and heat to reject. On a fit-out with no back-of-house space to give, that is a genuine planning constraint rather than a detail.
Two of the five cards are not shipping yet. Chroma 16 and ArcLamp are listed as available soon. Do not design a colour-changing scheme around a card with no ship date.

My read

The centralized-driver argument has been made before and has mostly lost, because the products asked you to buy the whole ecosystem. The C24V card and the S-Box’s support for third-party constant-current loads are what make this one different — you can bring your own luminaires to a good part of it.

The UL 924 listing with load shedding is the part I would build a specification around. Collapsing normal and emergency lighting into one addressable system, serviced from a rack, is worth more on a large hospitality or retail fit-out than any individual performance number on the datasheet.

ETC is represented in South Florida by SESCO Lighting, and I can specify it for projects inside that territory. If you want to look at the architecture against a real project rather than a brochure, send me the drawings through the inquiry form or call 786-395-1222, and I will tell you honestly whether it is the right shape for the job.

Sources and corrections

Figures in this piece are taken from ETC’s published F-Drive RX, F-Drive RX Power Supply and S-Box datasheets and from ETC’s own product pages. I have not yet had one on the bench. When I do, I will report what I find, including anything that does not match the paper.

If you have installed one, I would like to hear how the commissioning went and whether the cable budget landed where it was drawn. Corrections are welcome and will be printed.

The Spec Lock is written by David Blum, specification sales for SESCO Lighting in South Florida. I represent the lines on the SESCO line card. I am not a dealer or distributor for any of them, and I do not stock or ship fixtures.