2007 Aug 11 - Sat
The Geek Side of Lighting
Saturday didn't start off so well. I was going to ride my pedal bike into town for the
day. That was not to be. On getting on my bike, I find that it had flat. Rather than
fixing the flat right then, I put it off till Sunday, and drove my car into town. This
turned out to be fortuitous, as the theatre was having 'cleaning day', and I was able to
pick up a few pieces of furniture to haul home. However on the way back in, I decided to
take the 'scenic route' down to Flatts and back. It was such a nice day for a drive. My
car didn't think so. It decided to konk out a little ways back from Flatts on Middle Road.
I spent an hour or two sitting in the grass waiting for the tow truck to arrive. In
waiting, I noticed that there weren't too many, if any, 20 year Toyota's still around. Most
of the drivers had spiffy new cars. So being without transportation made it a bit difficult
to make it to a party I supposed to go to.
Instead, much belatedly, I made it back to BMDS and worked on finishing up making DMX
cables
for the four new High End Color Command lights the G&S Society donated. Making up the
cables went well. When it was all said and done, I had the following DMX chain:
- My laptop running LightFactory with a 512 channel license, and the High End light fixture
library
- An Enttec
DMX USB Pro adaptor, to control the DMX chain over USB from my laptop
- Four Color Command static color change light fixtures, with DMX offset 73
- A four channel
dimmer pack for testing the ColorCommand light intensity control, with
DMX offset 49
- the 48 channel house dimmer system, at DMX offset 1
In an earlier article, I made some misguided remark as to why the Color Command offset
appeared to be off by one. Upon reading the instructions, I found that the first channel is
assigned to the Color Control box itself. Sets of four channels after that are each
assigned to the Color Command lights: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and beam width. The colors
turn out to be bright, intense and beautiful.
I found that even though the DMX USB Pro has a DMX in, it doesn't segregate the in-stream
from the out-stream, it is simply pass through device. Therefore I couldn't connect up our
ETC Express 72/144 Light Board and use it as a physical submaster board input to the
software. I've ordered another DMX USB Pro to resolve that little issue: one will be 'in',
one will be DMX control 'out'.
My laptop is connected to the internet through a wireless access point. My PDA has
802.11 wireless capbility. The LightFactory software has a remote telnet capability with
software that can be loaded on my Windows Mobile 5 PDA. The combination makes for a time
saving and vocal chord saving ability to test light focus right from within the grid.
The easy part is done. Now the fun part of doing the lighting design is next.
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John H. Holland
Programs that learn, changing the course of calculation as the model accumulates
experience, are rare after almost half a century of endeavor. We still have little theory to
guide us and few implementations.
. John H. Holland
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