It is tough getting home from Opening Night. Often it is such a struggle to get everything done, staving off fatigue by sheer willpower for the long weeks of build and Tech, that when the show is ready and the pressure is finally off...you discover you've got nothing left holding you up.
So "Conference of the Birds" is open. That's one more thing off the list of the six things that decided to all happen at once (among other things, had a Holocron kit to ship and a microphone rental to prep.) Unfortunately it opened Thursday. Means I still have to go to work tomorrow. Can't really relax until Saturday. Worse, I'm working the show. Means I still have to make it not just through work but through another evening performance before I can finally sleep in.
The LEDs worked...okay. I had another bug to track down in the software (annoying thing the compiler should have caught -- I overloaded an array variable, writing data into a bit of memory that hadn't been reserved for it.) Means I only got one chance to write the various "looks" in the show. They work good enough, though.
See, the typical arrangement for a theatrical lighting effect is for the scripting to happen at the lighting console. The console tells the fixture what color and how bright, and if you want something like a candle flicker you have to write a loop into the console. The things I built for this -- and the philosophy behind my "DuckLights" -- is to handle animation at the fixture itself, and use the console only to switch between pre-baked effects.
The radio link turned out to be marginal once I moved up to the lighting booth -- and stuffed the lighting modules inside closed brass containers. Bet I could improve it a lot with external antenna. Lacking that, I may try adding a ground plane to my transmitter (I really don't understand antenna design, which is why it has a simple monopole quarter-wave on it now).
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