Theatre and lights.

I love going to the theater, no wonder my mom bought us a a subscription to a theater nearby, we were allowed to pick a couple (8?) shows from the coming year, we already had quite a few.

I like the plays in general, but I am still amazed by the lights. Just as any other kid I got a couple of those "disco lights" for my birthday and such.

Lightning isn't as easy as it looks, and that is what I found out last year just before summer break.
My mom's colleague asked if I wanted to help at a school play, just the technical side, sound and lights. We still had a few months before the actual play, and that was when I learned working with DMX.

DMX is the international protocol to control lights, t exists out of numbers from 0-255
0 being off and 255 the brightest everything in between is a dimmed light.
It is wonderful and you can't only control lights with it, but also scanners and moving heads.
Now moving heads are quite expensive, scanners being less and my mom's colleague had just bought a pair of them. Scanners are great, but the problem is that controlling them with sliders on a showmaster panel just doesn't give the accuracy you need to use it as a moving spotlight.
Instead we used it to reach areas normal lights couldn't get, little shows before the play and after gave us a the ability to entertain the crowd while the actors dressed up.

The play went great, it took us a full week to set everything up in the hall.
The most time taking the wiring. We only had 4 dimmerpacks which resulted in some nasty maths and buying new DMX cords which cost us quite a few euros.
The problem was that we only had limited cords to link the lights to the dimmerpack and it's always handy if you can have the lights "grouped", in the way of, having a couple of the same spots in a row on the slider panel. We couldn't use soft-patching either, so we had to do everything the hard way: Trial and Error.

Then a second problem occured, the lights, who were hung up on a long iron beam only secured at 2 points, started to sag.
We fixed this by using little chains and trying to suspend it from them. Worked like a dream.

Then the hardest part of all started, we had 5 hours to fix the lights for all the scenes, programming them on the showmaster. Only because we completely forgot how to programm "steps" it took us another 30 minutes plowing through the manuals and doing a little test.
We ran out of time and the poor actors could go home 1 hour later than we planned. And still it wasn't done. I believe we fixed the last 3 scenes only 2 hours before the first show. We had little time left and thats what we used to programm little pre-shows. The comments were amazing. The show was a succes.

I'm addicted to theatre, I think, and I judge a big part of the plays I go to on the lightning.

So what I was wanting to say is that, I don't have the money to buy DMX in real life, so I simulated it in a game called Gmod.

I started of doing a basic slider set up.


And then I started to make it a little more advanced, still using the same technique but I found out a masterslider can be very usefull.


And then a couple of weeks ago, I decided I would have to hard code it. Which I did, I used a chip that manipulates given inputs and so gives other outputs. I also made a scanner for it.


The biggest change is that instead of using the 255 units I only used 30.
255/30 gives a whole new ouput, less accurate but you won't notice the difference if you do it right.