Future (theater) shock

The Control Booth forum has started emailing notifications again so I logged in to see what they were talking about.

At least two of the projects I'd been tinkering with over the years have been done by others. And done well.

The simpler is the QU-Box, which leverages a Teensy (Arduino compatible with native USB capability) and some arcade buttons to make a dedicated controller box for QLab. Honestly, though, I was an evening of soldering away from doing it for decades -- but my Korg nanokey worked so well for me I never saw the point in completing the project.

Still, kudos to Simon for making a solid, functional device and offering it in kit form for the extra budget-conscious.

The other product I spotted was the RC4 wireless dimmer system. These are quite pricey but I'd still recommend them without reservation. I have nothing against hacks but by the time you come up with a working system you will have spent almost as much, and a lot of time you usually can't afford on a theater tech schedule.

And the guy is smart. He's thought of all the things I thought of, and put most of them in the box. A lot of people would just rig a bunch of PWM outputs and call it done. He's recognized the nonlinearity of output and subsequent color rendering, and put in a much more sophisticated version of the gamut look-up table I have running on my Holocrons.

He's also added what he calls Digital Persistence (another thing I've had to do in many of my projects), which is modifying the output so instead of coming on and going off near-instantly, LEDs will behave more like incandescent bulbs. This is easy for him because he's implemented another thing I was using as a paradigm; although direct multi-channel control is the default, his devices can run a baked-in animation in stand-alone mode instead of having to receive a constant stream of instructions.




Okay, I'd still like to see my prop light thing. But skip the wireless stage -- I'm not doing that much theater anymore and it adds too much complexity. Free-running behavior, preferably set through a full-on GUI running on a host computer and uploaded via USB. Built-in LiPo management, because again, AA batteries make more sense in a theatrical context but LiPo makes more sense for cosplay and other replica prop use.

And, here's the thing. Theatrical props, especially, it makes sense from a budget and time standpoint to take something commercial (usually a toy) and throw it in there. Often it is enough that it lights up. But even something more color-critical like a storm lantern or an old radio it's easy enough for theatrical purposes to wrap some gel around it or otherwise get it "close enough."

For a replica prop, there's more of an onus on getting it to look exactly right, so flexibility and programmability are good. But here it makes sense to leverage the mostly-done-for-you end of the hacker spectrum; Arduinos, various lighting boards, neopixel strips, etc. You pay a little more but given how many hours and bucks went into the prop, that's not a real problem.

The exception I still see is when a specific prop places something at a premium. Cost (because you need dozens of duplicates), space, etc.

For instance, my Wraith Stone. What I want it to do requires a dedicated board. And I'm fine with that -- just as I'm fine with people hacking up a $4 LED charm bracelet if that's what works.

Trust

Far too often I don't feel "up to" working with power tools and opt to work quietly on the computer or take a break entirely.

Too often. So today I pushed forward instead, and in less than five minutes -- moments after starting the first connection -- I put my soldering iron right into a finger.

Maybe it is better to trust that little voice.

(Regardless, as soon as I can take my finger out of the glass of ice water I'm going to try that joint again).

10,000 Fleece

I've made the first major error on a PCB. The drill holes are too small for the LEDs. I can ream them out easily enough, but I'm using the through plating as a via in several places. With luck I can solder top and bottom and restore connection...but that also emphasizes that I completely forgot I was going to increase the size of the annular ring on several of the pads, too.

Ah, well. It is going to take weeks to laser-cut enough Holocron kits to even use up the first set of PCBs. The lasers are booked nearly solid, and even on top of it being cold and dark and often raining when work ends I've been feeling sickly and not up for the trip to the shop anyhow. And besides, I have enough parts to build one full production model, so I'm doing that first (in case I discover something new that needs to be adjusted).

And as for the boards? The v1.1 revision was just a stop-gap, mostly improving the silkscreen and adding a resistor to the resistor ladder. The next revision I suspect strongly I'm going to go for a "larger" CPU chip (but do it in surface mount instead of DIP). I'm also tempted in the direction of taking off the USB socket and replacing it with a microSD socket. Except the controller chip for above is a thirty-six pin SMD that can't be hand-soldered -- that's a big jump up in my SMD skills.



Made a breakthrough on the fiddle. Apparently the beginner is supposed to play detaché, separating each note. I've been practicing legato since the beginning.

Well, immediately on hearing that I tried putting a slight pause in the bow between notes. Wow. All that struggle to get clean string crossings in a slur has really paid off. With that little pause it is downright simple. Oh, and I can dial the pause down to barely perceptible and still get the benefit.

Similar really to my fun with shoulder rests. It was far too hard to handle the violin at first. Shoulder rest allowed me to progress. A better shoulder rest allowed me to move to the next stage. But now that I'm so much more comfortable moving about the fingerboard and keeping the violin balanced, I can omit the shoulder rest and play nearly as well.

So now I throw in a "naked" practice session at intervals. No shoulder rest, no Snark tuner; just ears and meat (and a thick shirt...yes, it can hurt without that padded rest!) So I can get through Hava Nagila without stumbling...but I still have squeaks and some other finger noise to clean up (and my intonation will continue to need work. Especially as the string crossings are just horrible in the C part and I've been playing that in third position as an alternative).




Trying my first audiobook now; listening to a free reading of the Anabasis I found online. Which means I'm avoiding spoilers for a work that came out 2,300 years ago.

Also read a couple more Kindle books. Both were oddly alike in having a very breezy tone; short sentences, short paragraphs, simple construction. Also both alike in having fairly poor description. One is (more or less) in first person and eschews scene breaks or other real organization, letting changes of space or time roll right past, moving in and out of dialog or action without pause or even change of pace.

The other at least has some of that helpful organization, but uses the increasingly rare third-person omniscient. Which I think is a horrendously poor choice, but could perhaps be excused or at least explained as a larger choice that may not be that of the authors.

To explain; this is a Tomb Raider book -- a proper printed book for all that I read it on Kindle -- and it features the 2013 "reboot" Lara Croft and is explicitly set immediately following the events of the 2013 game.

This game is basically subtitled "Birth of a Survivor." It takes Lara as a young, inexperienced student on her first serious expedition, and drops her into a hellscape where she is beaten down to her essence; becoming both dogged survivor and (as necessary) brutal killer.

Which means any work featuring her, and particularly one that pretends to follow the events of the game, should be about her struggle to return to the normal world and come to terms with what she was forced to do. And indeed, the book -- The Ten Thousand Immortals -- shows her having panic attacks and flashbacks and struggling to re-define her belief system after being confronted with the reality of nigh-immortal weather-controlling undead queens on the haunted island of Yamatai.

This can be done in third person omniscient. It is just in my opinion much harder to do it right. Because what matters to the reader is not the clinical dissection of Lara's inner life. It is not the unwrapping of the complexities of a psyche in the way of Joyce's Ulysses. What the reader wants is to feel along with Lara. To be invited in, to even experience this vicariously -- the way the game allows you to do. Third person limited, or first person, are better narrative choices.

(Something which even one of the game development team seems to have misunderstood. But never mind about that now!)

And this is even a good point from a mechanistic story-telling direction. Much of the story has Lara possibly being followed, not sure who to trust, wondering if she is surrounded by enemies or if she is merely letting her post-traumatic stress drive her to unwarranted paranoia. This confusion on her part is completely undercut by an omniscient point of view that at any moment can and does cut to the very person who actually is following her, and listen to their interior monologue about exactly why they are following her and who they work for and what the whole mystery is about.

A more limited perspective is perfect here. Seeing only what Lara sees is a better mechanical way to present the mystery and suspense of who to trust and when to be wary (as well as being a vastly superior way to let you empathize with her situation emotionally). This shades all the way down to the small tricks; a detached omniscient observer makes Lara look foolish in those rare moments when she lets her guard down. Seeing the scene through her POV, the narrative can subtly guide both where you are allowed to look and how you feel about what you see; presenting open, clear vistas or presenting menacing shadows, and make her reactions feel justified and rational to the reader.

So the escape hatch I alluded to earlier is this; perhaps the authors were asked to provide an adventure, told not to actually develop her character any because all that would be in the games, and basically were led into presenting the bones of a story without most of what allows for proper emotional involvement. It is Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff; lots of running around and shooting and that all sounds exciting on paper but there is so little tangible about any of it -- especially the inner life of the people involved -- it is not terribly thrilling.

But there is more here. One of the two authors involved has a more recent book featuring the "Classic" Lara Croft. And three paragraphs in he threw me right out of the story by featuring a "20mm steel-kern climbing rope."

Okay, sure, the movies (and many books) will always get the details wrong of that thing you yourself are expert in. And maybe the non-expert will never even notice, although to someone who knows anything about climbing, that description is ridiculous as specifying a "Diesel powered laptop computer with a 74" screen."

But no. It takes less than a minute to do better than that. This story was written within the last few years and yes Google and Wikipedia were available. Heck; Lara Croft is using both constantly within the story itself! If the author did enough research to find out what kernmantle construction is, then he damned well would have learned the difference between static and dynamic, and as well been presented with examples of appropriate diameters.

Even going from first principles, a basic understanding of the physical universe would clue you in that something was off. As my friend put it, Lara Croft must be tough stuff if she nonchalantly ties a knot in a half-inch steel cable.

(And, no, you can't get out of this one by assuming a typo on the number. Because pretty much every single other detail about this rope and how it is used is wrong.)

In any case, 10,000 Immortals (the previous book and the one under discussion) doesn't make quite such obvious errors. The archaeology is terribly simplistic, and I think that too is a mistake. The games may not give that much detail, but there's good indication there's a contingent of the audience that does want to see more. What bugs me, though, is the ways the book looks like it is getting wrong things that people with even a smattering of a classical education will already see are wrong.

The title is one. It is referring to the Persian Immortals. Sort of. It is about half-way through the book that it becomes clear there is a group that calls themselves "the ten thousand immortals" and has based the name on the so-called "Immortals" of Persepolis et al. And the book correctly at that point explains the legend that there were 10,000 of these elite soldiers, exactly; as one died, another would be sworn in to take his place.

Except that this is another one of those many, many places where Herodotus...well, you know the drill. And even the name is quite possibly a mistaken translation. So the book jars once in that Lara doesn't seem to know who the Immortals are (despite apparently having that good Classics education) and that makes her look like an idiot. And the book doesn't correct her at first, making it look like an idiot. Only eventually does the truth out, finally making the title seem less awkward -- but it does this a few chapters in and never moves past that "revelation" that is probably within the first hour on Persia in your History of the Ancient World 101 class. (And what is especially ridiculous is that at some point the writer provides the name "Anûšiya." So he almost certainly knew and was choosing to either ignore or withhold the more complex real story.)

The Golden Fleece is an even better case, reeling out the bit about gold-panning with sheep wool about five chapters in, but never moving a step beyond that not particularly obscure revelation. This book has either a frightfully low opinion of its audience, or is written by someone a lot less educated than he thinks he is. One keeps hoping there will be something about the Argonauts that goes beyond what appeared in the Harryhausen film. In vain. The story actually moves the Aegean and an archaeological expedition and a rock-cut cliff dwelling and reveals -- damn-all. Again, what little is revealed on the subject happens less than half of the way in. The rest of the book spins out chases and shootout with nary a new bit of historical information or archaeological clue from then on out.

I am tempted to blame the usual process of "Decide on the plot first, then pick and chose the historic and/or scientific details that support it." There is also some hair-thin evidence that the bad-guy group are the ones who are making the stupid errors; that they are essentially Foucalt's Pendulum-ing themselves. There's a bit of business, for instance, with a derringer that is claimed to be but is as likely not to be the one used by John Wilkes Booth. (A derringer which is never fired, despite being on that damned mantlepiece at least twice). So one can half believe the bad guys were meant to be idiots who didn't understand who the Persian Immortals really were, or know anything more than a teenager (and from the evidence, a poor student at that) does about Jason and the Golden Fleece.

There's another oddity there. The reviews on Amazon fall into two categories; long, carefully written reviews that lay out in detail the literary offenses, or one-word reviews with five stars. The suspicious take here is the latter are spammed to drive the rating up. A different view, though, is potentially illuminating. Maybe the breezy, error-filled, childishly simplistic writing is all these particular reviewers needed or even wanted. The ones that have a word or two other than "Amazing!" talk only about how cool it is to have the character from the games be in a book. It would be informative to introduce these reviewers to something like the deeply psychological fanfic "Easier to Run" and see if that opens their eyes to how much more a story can offer.



A few words now on the other Kindle find. I've now read the first and second books of the "Athena Lee" chronicles and I doubt I will read any others. The premise is promising; a young woman is marooned amid the wreckage of a space battle that went well for nobody. Her thing, however, is engineering. Survive until rescue? Deal with the changes in politics back home, threats on her life, pirate attacks, treason..? Whatever it is, she's got a spanner and a slide rule and she's going to engineer the heck out of it.

The character has an engaging voice and what can be seen of her personality is amusing. There are some cute touches elsewhere (although a little 1990's pop culture goes a long way). The problem is, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe engineering. Actually, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe anything. Well, actually -- the author doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of how to write. I read a free excerpt from Book 8 and he seems to be just starting to learn how to handle POV changes and exposition.

These books, too, have many short (as few as one or two word) reviews praising them highly. Again I have to wonder if someone is gaming Amazon's rating systems. But the unsettling and more likely answer is that there are people who have read so few books they have yet to discover that they get a hell of a lot better than this.

Like the Tomb Raider story above, it should not be enough that a character you like is on the page. Or that people are shooting at stuff and so it must be exciting. Those can be, should, usually are a given in a piece of genre fiction, but said piece is also generally expected to bring a minimum standard of craftsmanship with it. To leave one with a sense of place, to portray characters well enough one can speak of them as if you had met them in person, to immerse the reader in the experience and smoothly and seamlessly carry them through transitions and exposition and all the other necessary stage machinery of an unfolding plot.

Ten Thousand Immortals is a madeleine offered in excuse of a full meal. The Forgotten Engineer is a handful of granulated sugar offered in excuse of actual food.

Whadaya mean, "too sensitive?"

Monday I did a long workday, went to the gym, worked on the Holocron, went out for dinner, and still had time for a few minutes of fiddle practice.

Tuesday I was sore, nor did it help that I had to climb the walls of the theater (pretty much literally, using rock-climbing moves up the unistrut to get to the things I needed to adjust). But still got the Holocron work and the fiddle practice in.

But I am so glad Wednesday was a short day and the next four days are off work.

I needed to dial in the sensitivity on the touch sensor before I moved on to the last parts of the software. And that took four days. And the solution is a software cludge. 

The theory is simple. Let current leak through a high-value resistor into the parasitic capacitance around an input pin and associated antenna until it charges and trips the pin. Measure the time; that's the total capacitance. 

A human body in contact with, or even close to, the circuit changes that time and you can thus detect it. I can get the circuit to detect a hand moving six inches away.

But not in a stable way. The values fluctuate too much, including the sensitivity climbing up steadily over time. The touch I'm looking for is getting lost in the noise.

And two other problems. The sensor wire is inside a sealed acrylic cube. So the ground floats when it is used in battery mode. And the sensitivity goes way up when it is tethered via USB. So my software cludge looks at the detect events and if they are way, way above the default threshold it assumes the Holocron is on USB and flips to the higher threshold setting. And I'm forcing auto-calibration at frequent intervals. And I'll probably write in a masking routing to prevent trips from coming too close together.

(That's more RTOS stuff there, of course. The Holocron is constantly feeding illumination level and color updates to the neo-pixels, meaning you have to use counters and/or interrupts instead of relying on delay() to tweak the timing.)

On to a new "Talk" animation, and take at least a weak swing at the user programming buttons. I've got the first six boards soldered up now and I have at least that many orders waiting to be filled. I'm glad I'm smart about this and have refused to accept payment until I'm ready to ship. (Because I still have to run out to the lasers to cut more pieces, too. At least the designing is finally done on that.)

Oh, and I just ran into the cutest hack on Hackaday. I'm already leveraging the fact that you can reboot the Holocron merely by tipping it far enough to activate the tilt sensor. But with a capacitor on an I/O pin, you can detect if the sleep interval was short or long. Meaning different behaviors depending on whether it has just been turned on, or if the user tips and restores.

And, yes, I was tempted to give up on the capacitive sensor and use this to trigger the sound effects on the "Talking" Holocron. But it made it a little too much like a Moo Can.

Cold

It's cold out. Rainy also.

Good day to spend inside prop-making. Where I'm chasing down cold solder joints. Perhaps I need to scrub my PCB's before I start soldering on them. Or on the revised board (which I thought was complete until I thought of adding pins for a "talking" version), increase the annular rings on some of the critical pads.

No failure yet on any surface-mount component. But the hand soldering has thrown up two USB jack errors and even a couple of loose joints on the LEDs.

Oh, yeah. Talking. There's an Adafruit board that will trigger 10 consecutive (or random) sound files when a single pin is held low. Unfortunately they discontinued the version with an on-board power amp, which means I need to find space on the Holocron for two additional circuit boards. This, and even more ribbon cable, is so aesthetically displeasing I don't really feel like making this a standard option. After all, this is why I went through all the effort to make a single stand-alone board that combines charge management, USB hosting, and LED controller:

Also aesthetically displeasing is the sound. I experimented with the drivers I had lying around, and I needed to pump up to three watts into a quality driver before it could push its way out of the acrylic box and sound half-way decent. I've gone and ordered another of the surface mount transducers that failed me on the raygun project --

-- because anywhere else would create at the least a nasty shadow and possibly require a hole in the box as well. Besides, sound coming from a hole sounds like sound coming from a hole. It is a better effect if it sounds like the box itself is making the sound.

Pity I happen to know a little acoustics (and cabinet design). Because what this really calls for is a ported enclosure:

But that totally changes the look of the Holocron. And this is not a time to think outside the box. I've spent way too long refining on this particular box. It is time to brave the rain, visit the lasers and cut enough pieces to start shipping complete Holocron kits. (I have just enough to make one complete kit now, and I might assemble it myself just as a final check of the latest round of adjustments).

Or solder up the last of the current run of circuit boards. I stopped dead when I ran into odd USB behavior, but now I know what was going wrong and can fix it. I should probably solder up a complete "talking" Holocron before I order the version 1.1 boards, though. There's just barely space to put a couple more terminals for that...



(Oh, yeah; there's alternates. Best is go with Teensy and the Adafruit audio adaptor daughterboard for it. Skip USB hosting and in-place recharge and just put a string of Neopixels in for lighting. The Teensy does the heavy lifting of not just sound playback but DSP to equalize it. But that's costlier, still messy, takes up even more space, and requires I spend time programming.)

Help me, Obi-Wan

I'm in the middle of filling those Holocron orders. I'm already sick of them...been sick of Holocrons for months now.

Oh, but while I was restocking parts at Adafruit (I'm dangerously low on some of the Holocron components already) I rediscovered a very cute little OGG-based sound board they have there. It's got flash built-in, is visible via USB as a standard mass storage device, and can be as easily triggered from a free microcomputer pin as it can be from buttons.

So I actually could make a Talking Holocron without that much more equipment. Since I've kind of overtasked the CPU of the current Holocircuit already, this would be a re-purpose of my previous Cree-based board (or the next generation Cree board...long discussion there about what is going to go on it, though.)

And it would also be a good excuse to test Cree lighting of a Holocron; now that I've incorporated the internal diffusor I previously thought was going to be too complicated to do...

Way Hot

The delightful image above is from a lightweight but not completely horrible 1993 version of the venerable Journey to the Center of the Earth; another failed series opener released as a stand-alone TV special. It is much, more more Pelucidar than it is anything from Verne, but anyhow.

Weather is starting to cool but I'm walking to work. I'll see how long I can take this. Come the first of October, my boss is going to talk to his bosses about trying to get me a raise to something a wee bit higher than the new minimum wage.

The holocircuit has passed all tests.

Even with a mere 150 mAh lithium polymer cell I got seven and a half hours at the nominal/bright setting. That's plenty long enough. Unfortunately I'm down to scraps of acrylic...and Tap Plastics is inconvenient to public transit.

(No inconvenient to get to, per se. But inconvenient to get back from while holding unwieldy sheets of material that is quite capable of giving you nasty cuts. Bad enough riding BART with the things. Walking a mile in the heat with them is an experience I'm not longing to repeat).

The light went out!

Alternative title (for those who don't remember Ralph Bashki's Wizards); "Hey! Who turned out the lights!" (One of the freakiest Doctor Who monsters ever!)

I tested the load sharing and charge circuit on my new board. The battery I had been using for testing was pretty badly drained and after waiting two hours it was a relief to see the "charge" light finally go out. Means the schotkey and MOSFET are doing their jobs correctly. Next up is install it in a holocron for a lighting test. Then write some quick-and-dirty code to test the user option buttons.

Taking a step back, this is a big change in how I do electronics. I was just window-shopping at Adafruit and I realized I don't see myself needing any protoboard soon. Or even a lot of hookup wire. I've pretty much moved over to PCBs.

This is actually the previous version, plus my first-ever surface mount PCB

To recap, this is the process of the Holocron circuit I'm testing now;

1) Drew up the schematic in EAGLE

2) Ordered parts, mostly from Digikey

3) Drafted the board in EAGLE

4) Sent the EAGLE files out to OSHpark, a board making company.

5) When all the mail had arrived, stuck the smaller parts on the board with a syringe of paste and then put the board into my T-962 to solder them all at one go.

6) After the board cooled, hand-soldered larger components like the USB jacks.

7) Attached my Adafruit USBtinyISP to the new board's header, and flashed the on-board CPU with the software I'd written in the Arduino IDE.

8) Test and install


The first disjunct from how I did things as a teen is although I still have a big parts box, I don't use it unless I've made a mistake or need to test something or are too impatient. For the most part, I spec out the exact components I need and find them through the parametric sorting system at Digikey.

Digikey is very friendly towards small orders, and has a huge catalog. What makes it navigable is their parametric system; the usual method is to drill down, specifying the most important values first and winnowing down the choices.

The next big change is going to printed circuit boards. There are a number of fab houses now that will do small prototype runs for cheap. So I do a lot less of assembling components on protoboard (although that still has its place). PCBs allow me to make a denser, more compact board, they offer much higher reliability, they are faster, and lastly, they are the only practical way to include surface-mount components.

Perfboard construction. Even protoboard is neater (and faster) than this!

EAGLE is the key tool here. There are other programs to draft PCBs. EAGLE has a hobby version that is essentially full-function (just restricted in board size and layer count). It also has a schematic editor, and the nifty thing is, board and schematic are automatically linked. So the software will ensure you route your copper traces to make exactly the same connections as are shown in the schematic.

There are software tools out there to simulate the circuit itself. I haven't used those yet. Schematic is helpful enough. The big trick with EAGLE is parts libraries. There are many libraries contributed by users (the big hobby vendors like Spark Fun and Adafruit have libraries for most of the parts they sell) but I'm afraid not all the footprints are trustworthy. So the trick with EAGLE is to slowly build up your own unique library of trusted parts, parts you have personally verified on a PCB you have made. Fortunately, the EAGLE editor is odd, but useable; I've several personally created parts that have now been tested in production.

Again this is the previous version. This is most of the layers turned on in the EAGLE display; top copper, bottom copper, silkscreen...

It is quite possible to hand-solder surface mount (some crazy people even hand-solder the seemingly impossible, like BGA components). Faster, neater, and more electrically sound results come from reflow soldering. Basically you put a specially formulated paste of microspheres of solder in a flux base on the board, plop the components on top, and then carefully bring it to a calculated temperature over a carefully timed interval so the solder melts, flows, and then hardens correctly.

The software-controlled infrared heat lamp of my T-962 reflow oven does this quite nicely (many people have improved their T-962's, many others have made their own out of toaster ovens and microcontrollers).

The hat is not essential to operation. A couple of fire bricks from my brazing days, however, are; it blows some pretty hot air out the bottom when in use.

And then I'm in the Arduino infrastructure. Arduino is basically a wrapper (you could even think of it as training wheels) around the AVR series of microcontrollers. I spent a while learning how to write straight C code and shove it into a "naked" AVR chip using avrdude, but the main thing that experimenting has left me with is an alternative to a working USB connection on my boards.

All I need is a six-pin header and I can plug in a USB adaptor I have. And after that, with some exceptions, I write Arduino-style code. The Arduino IDE is another piece of freeware. It is a bare-bones coding program, with essentially no advanced tools. But for the 8 KB of software I'm putting into a Holocron brain, it is enough. It's rather like the good old days of writing HTML pages in a text editor...

The main window of the Arduino code editor -- showing some very un-Arduino like code; these are direct register calls basically written in bog-standard C.

It took a few years to get all the pieces of this toolchain into place, but now I have it, doing electronics has largely moved for me from squinting at poorly-labeled parts, tacking them in place with random bits of colored wire and hoping, to a largely computer-aided process executed on the laptop.

Which is a lot like much of my props-making now. I'm making still-increasing use of laser cutting, which translates 2D CAD (actually, Illustrator -- and actually, I use the freeware Inkscape despite some ongoing file conversion woes) into precise cuts in the material. And 3d printing, naturellement.

Holocron N

The new boards arrived early; I didn't expect them until Monday.

I did make one mistake with my parts orders; I got some 100 ohm resistors instead of the 100K I needed. Hopefully I can compensate. Just got done placing components one by one on the first assembly and it is in the T-962 right now.

And, so far, so good. Had a bad hour or so when the neopixel didn't respond, but after splicing it into a previous circuit board to test it, realized the problem might be with the fuse setting on the AVR. Which it proved -- and thank you, since version 1.0 of the Arduino IDE you can burn those fuses automagically from the console. But I'll get some sleep before I test the charge circuit.

Yesterday I lasered again, mostly re-designing the internal diffusion cube to work better with the circuit board. If it all works I should be able to finally assemble a complete prototype with proper lighting (diffusion cube test, with an ad-hoc light source propped inside, in the picture below):

The sales thread at the RPF is started now and I've had eight requests for a fully assembled model. I have promised to show how some of the alternates look before I take the orders, though. Last night I also lasered out a partial set of the new "Sentinel" diffusion pattern (that's a Jedi symbol surrounded by a "koan" in Aurabesh). I didn't have a chance to cut circuitry, though, nor have I finished either the "Steampunk" circuitry design or the final of three planned diffusion patterns (which I'm calling the "Guardian" pattern publicly, but it is mostly inspired by Doctor Who.)

I also have to tweak the programming. That will take a bit. One depressing thing I've discovered is after all that tweaking for best possible fit, the width of the cut (and the resulting tightness of fit) is largely dependent on how the laser is feeling that day.



I also have to fill a promise to a very patient lad in Germany for a couple Pulse Rifle grenades and some rounds to go with them. I have a half-dozen bodies from my last run, just awaiting the buttons to be installed. Which is a full four-hour slot on the lathe and precision work, which is why I haven't felt up to it yet. The rounds I'll make a try at doing on the M3d but I'm worried about the quality.

This is more fully-assembled holocrons than I had hoped to have to build. I need to clean up the work area and assembly-line them. But now that the holocron is mostly a solved problem, I can move on to the next props projects. My feeling is, the priority projects now are two; a Morrow Project laser for my friend;

And a Wraith Stone for me. The former may be a great excuse for traditional prop building -- to get away from the machining and CAD and so forth I've been doing lately, and get back for at least a little to balsa and paint.

The latter combines several technologies. I dived back into the Holocron as a "simpler" project to learn surface-mount electronics and Lithium Polymer charge circuits. The Wraith Stone is going to require both:

My intention is also to carve it in semi-traditional style -- MDF, Apoxie Sculpt, etc. -- but then to scan it, print it, then cast it in order to achieve the kind of detail level and materials qualities I want.

Pity no-one else expressed an interest in the Retro Raygun, though. I still need to take it back and swap out the speaker and LED for more powerful models, but otherwise any concern I may have had about keeping the working files is fast ebbing.

(And when I borrow it back, I'm also going to take some proper pictures!)

I am not left-handed

I'm taking a day or two off work to let my injured thumb heal. I needed it anyhow -- got a cold to get over as well, and I could use some uninterrupted time for prop work.

Amazing, though, how many things one uses a right thumb for. I've even trained my left (I'm a self-taught touch-typist) to hit the spacebar instead, but it throws me off.

Anyhow.

I've three variant holocrons coming along. Still trying to problem-solve on the related lighting and USB issues.

I hacked up my prototype today to try several different arrangements of an external USB connector. The latest try is trying right now. I think the best lighting is going to come from a diffusion cube suspended inside, and the simplest way to attach the circuit board that maintains easy access to it is to come up with a platform that glues right to the bottom lid. That way, the USB connector travels with it, no dangling wires.

As clever as I've tried to be with the USB jack, it still seems to mean there is both a visible seam and an even more unsightly hole in the side. Hence the quick repair and paint job so I can put it all together and eyeball just how bad it really looks.

And...it works. The hole is a trifle ugly but small enough you can more-or-less ignore it. And there's no distressing light leak either.

The neopixels I want are still on back-order. Might end up hand-soldering raw "5050" LEDs (those are the RGB's with integrated WS2811 driver chip) -- they have a poor survival rate when reflowed. Would save $3-4 in parts, but also would make the diffusor cube mandatory.

The revised Eagle CAD is coming along. I've got everything in a 2" x 2" footprint now, even the user programming buttons, and it still looks routable (the auto-router digested it without issue). Pulling the USB jack off the board will make it even easier.



Drat. But that was two days off from work. Sick days, yes. And I did a little cleaning, laundry, etc. But there's still enough to do on the laser files I'm not sure I'll even have those done in time to do on the weekend. And I've a promise to run off more grenades and some 10mm caseless rounds as well...

Lithic Reduction

I have one slim lead on the Holocircuit; the MOSFET I got may not have the right specs. I have a different -- better-tested in actual circuits -- one to try. I wish I could do all the calculations myself, but at the current extent of my electronics knowledge I'm basically doing this by cookbook. As long as I don't descend all the way to cargo cult...



The new instrument is here and looks good. I am actually a little disappointed. In that I put on new strings, checked the bridge height, tuned it, and did some practice bowing...and had no problems. I didn't break a string or drop a bridge, the pegs are all holding fine, and the very first time I touched rosined bow to the strings I got a clean tone. I was prepared for all sorts of difficulties. None of them showed up.

Maybe this was the Thomastik Alphayue's that made it this clean? Well...I do have a little work yet in string separation!

In any case, I actually expected I'd pick up bowing fast. I figure, if I can learn how to hold the tools for a wood lathe in a couple hours, I can pick up how to hold a bow. The part that I'm a lot less sanguine about is fingering. This is my first fretless instrument, and I'm really unsure if I've got the ears to manage it.

(I'm also thinking my collarbone is really going to prefer if I stop trying to be traditional and go and get a proper shoulder rest).



And no progress to speak of on the next Tomb Raider/SG1 chapter. I've been casting a research net in the general direction of North American neolithic, plus a little Mesoamerica and a side of Assyria up through to the Ottoman's.

But I've been thinking about flint knapping. And that led to an image, which opens up a very different approach to the flawed Tomb Raider (2013) story. I really like those moments where a Checkov's skill comes up; where the protagonist is backed into a corner, but it turns out to be a very familiar corner. And they give a thin smile, and say to themselves, "You're on my home ground now."

I really like the image of Lara Croft -- as the young student shipwrecked on Yamatai -- making herself a stone knife, or spear, or arrow points. This is divergent from the idea of wilderness survival skills. What I'm linking to here is the idea of experimental archaeology.

Oddly enough, the flint knapping community (the chance is that there are more people knocking flakes off stone today than had been doing so at any particular moment in neolithic times) doesn't really appear to be conscious of their activity as neolithic per se. They are more likely to characterize it as an art of indigenous people, to the extent that one popular tool/method is referred to as an "Ishi Stick" (after The Last of His Tribe himself).

(The flint knappers also don't see it as a "dead" technology. To them, there is a continuum between faithful recreation of what they sometimes refer to as aboriginal tools to modern hunting, wilderness survival, and general crafts.)

Experimental archaeology gets into all sorts of things, including the monumental; transporting a stone Moai from Rapa Nui using nothing but ropes and volunteers, erecting a (small) pyramid, and of course crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft. It is stretching things a little to expect Miss Random Grad Student to have gotten so deep into the practical neolithic reconstruction that she could knock out a nice biface in a couple of hours.

But it's a cool conceit, and that counts for a lot in writing. And I've harped on this before. Lara Croft has always spent a chunk of her adventures finding the secret passage or starting the ancient water wheel in order to progress, and the (generally not experienced as such by the player) implication is that her knowledge of ancient cultures is what lets her do this.

So here's an island that's a rabbit warren of mouldering old temples and shrines, with all sorts of hidden secrets, and here's someone who understands what it is she's looking at; who can read the glyph pointing to a debris-hidden doorway, or understands the purpose of a deadfall. A lot more interesting, I think, than her magically developing the entirely orthogonal skill-set of firing off WWII era sub-machine guns and gunning her way through the opposition.

Perhaps this doesn't look a lot like Yamatai. But what it does look like, if you played it right, is that moment where the scared but determined young woman, fleeing from the men pursuing her, realizes just where she is and how her specialized skills can be of use. And smiles. "I'm an archaeologist, boys," she says softly to herself. "And now you are on my home ground."

(Of course it's no cakewalk. There are reversals. And there are plenty of places where those skills aren't what she needs. Because one of the best things you can do to your characters is throw them into a situation where they are uncomfortable. That's why I'm aiming in my fanfic, across the distance of at least another four chapters, Jack O'Neill separated from the usual engineer types like Samantha Carter and having to try to fix a complicated machine all by himself. "What do I look like," he grouses, "MacGuyver?" But with that said, there is such a satisfying moment when your character gets to demonstrate why they are the best at what they do.)

Holocircuit progress report

Well, it mostly works.

The Kapton tape arrived Saturday, and I opened up the reflow oven. Yup. A bunch of cheap paper masking tape in there. Removed all of that, replaced it with the Kapton, closed it back up. And the oven worked fine the first time, without any bad smells.

On the bad side, turns out I'd gotten a syringe of solder flux, not solder paste. And was surprisingly hard to determine this; almost all the available information and reviews assumed you were looking for flux, and explained in detail all the ways it was a good flux. And every now and then there'd be a "...and for soldering" which was vague enough to be misleading. So I won't need the oven again until a syringe (or jar) of the real stuff gets here.

Well, with the board properly fluxed and all the components stuck down, it was really no problem to go around and run some solder on to all the components with an iron. I only got one solder bridge -- although, here, the oft-lauded solder wick method completely failed to work and I had to use a solder pump to remove the excess solder.

USB through-connection worked; I was able to access a thumb drive. ICSP worked; I was able to upload the software from the previous holocron (after wasting some time replacing the ATtiny45 with an ATtiny85 -- until I realized I'd already known I needed the larger program memory of the latter, and had in fact ordered and soldered in an ATtiny85 in the first place.

I also had both LEDs the wrong way around but after that got a clean power indicator and charge indicator. And the LiPo charge circuit worked like a charm, successfully charging the battery. The mercury tilt switch did its job as well and the capacitance sensor is working even without the antenna and the NeoPixels did their magic.

However. The last part of the load sharing circuit isn't working. I've traced and tested all the leads, gone back to check the circuit and the pinout, even swapped out the MOSFET and did a new clean solder job. The MOSFET isn't switching; the LiPo won't connect. So I'm a bit depressed right now: I don't have any good ideas as to why it isn't working. It's a very simple circuit, described in at least one brochure. About the only lead I have currently is that the MOSFET I'm using may not actually be the optimal one -- but I'm not really sure which specs would need to be different (plus I'm not happy about having to table work on that part of the circuit until another order can get here from DigiKey).

And as poorly as I'm feeling this weekend, I know it will be a long week in hot weather (and things are a little tense at work; sales are down and we've had to lay off some people). In short, I'm unlikely to be particularly brainy next week. And I'm also realizing just how much programming I want to do on this circuit before it is ready to ship.

Not to mention the physical layer. Finishing the artwork for the laser engraver is going to take a bunch of hours yet. And although I've figured out almost everything else, I'm caught in a nasty little loop trying to find some way to make the 1/8" magnets fit properly into laser-cut slots in the nominal 1/8" acrylic.

Yes. Acrylic (like baltic birch plywood, oddly enough -- and I'm sure there's more) is manufactured in metric. 3mm estimated in this case, caliper measured 2.98mm for the piece I cut last week. And then it is sold in Imperial.

Unfortunately neither magnets nor even ferromagnetic material (aka stainless steel) is commonly sold around here in small metric sizes. And you can't grind down a magnet (not that I want to; there's too much labor in this thing already for the price point I'm trying to hit). And I can't even engrave the difference on the laser, because the needed slot is on the back side to where I'm making my other cuts from, and the software on the new machines has a rather critical flaw when it comes to lining up multiple elements that way.

Oh, yeah. And until I solve that, I can't even cut the final shell piece, meaning I can't go ahead and start painting up shell elements of my new prototype.

I'm going for an oxidized, strongly weathered copper/brass for this one. Star Wars is a used universe, after all. Basically, I'm making the "hero" version of what was seen in an animation.

Waiting

Dropped some extra bucks on Amazon to get them to ship the last part of my order. The oven has been here for days:

(No, it doesn't come with the hat. It also didn't come with the Kapton tape I ordered, but tracking says I'll finally get that today.)

The components have been here for a while (Digikey is fast, as is Adafruit):

And the new board arrived yesterday from OSHpark:

So far everything seems correct. The footprint for the USB connector is slightly wrong but still fits -- I'll need to fix my Eagle library part. On the down side, it is larger than I was envisioning. Yes, I had measurements, but I didn't make a test cut-out. I was more concerned about having enough room to clear traces and be able to reach the SMDs to place and solder them.

Well, looking at it now, I'm comfortable with compacting it quite a bit. And changing over the larger SMDs (1206 size) to 0805's. Or possible even 0603's (those sizes only really hold for resistors, but it's a pretty good guideline to how small you are getting).

At least I've finally figured out how to translate the sketches I've been making for the Holocron diffusion layer into black and white (the laser engraver will respond to gray-scale information, but on acrylic the results aren't usually worthwhile):

And I picked up a set of Thomastik Alphayue's. Which means for some people I've just given the game away on the new instrument...currently tracked to arrive Monday, and I'm having a heck of a time waiting for it!

Rudimentary what?

If a lathe can build a lathe, it makes total sense that there are scads of people upgrading their cheap T962 reflow ovens (used to solder surface mount components)....with new circuit boards filled with surface mount components. (Well, the first thing I printed with a borrowed M3D 3d printer was a spool holder for itself).

I'm already unhappy with some aspects of my new board. I plan to drop down to 0805 chip size, for instance, and (having carefully read the Design Rules at OSHPark) narrower traces packed closer together. I can probably shrink the board by half! But I'll wait before I change anything. I expect to learn quite a bit when I solder up the first prototypes, and more when I try to program them and put them in Holocron kits.

Already I have grand dreams, of course. Given one of various audio chips and a socket for micro-SD, I could actually make a "talking" holocron. And of course if some of the ideas on the new board pan out, I'll be one step closer to actually having the DuckLite marketable. Oh, yes. And back to Wraith Stone as well (already I'm wondering...can I do capacitive touch sensing if it is hung around my neck?)



Also burned a CD for dad. He probably knows very well that video games passed the chip-tunes barrier roughly the time they stopped using vector graphics. But I'm not putting together a "greatest hits." The original conversation was about amateur covers, so I've tried to pack in a good spectrum of skill levels and a variety of approaches, from people recording themselves on a camera phone messing around on the piano in their front room, to professional-level production numbers like the work of Lindsey Stirling.

The first video I saw from Lindsey, she did a nice cover on violin of themes from the Zelda series. The production values really raised the bar; exceptional recording and mixing and professional-level backing tracks that are almost seamless. And the video is of her traipsing in gorgeous scenery, with her violin and with equally gorgeous outfits based on characters from the game. But what really nails it is how lively she is, sawing away at her violin, leaping about, all with this fantastic grin on her face.

Oh, yes, and there was one of those Oh My God moments. You know how it is when you've just learned about something new, something you are just getting into, something you want to share your excitement of with friends? And you open the wrong door and suddenly there's this massive conference room absolutely jammed by people who are into the same thing and know it more deeply and more expertly and are more passionate about it than you will ever be.

Yeah, all of this discovery of amateur covers of music from video games has been like that. Well, I knew they were out there. I didn't realize just how many, how good they really were, and how popular they are. The moment that really informed me was a video from a concert of game music (with a professional orchestra and band) at the Symphony Hall in Boston.

So soloist steps up and starts singing. Giant cheer as the crowd recognizes the number ("Still Alive," of course, from the breakout hit Portal). But that's not the worst. They start singing along. A huge, symphony-hall sized audience, and every one was a better fan than I'll ever be. I recognize the tune. They know all the words.

(There's another moment in the same video that perhaps needs some setting up. The lyric is "Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, haha, fat chance." Well, the soloist stepped back and let the audience sing that part. And I can't help thinking that there was a certain bitter humor in their voices. Because "Black Mesa" is the location of the first game in the Half-Life series, games created by the same company who made Portal, and the long-awaited third and final game of that series is now considered by fans to be the gaming industry's greatest piece of vaporware. "Haha, fat chance," all right. There is no longer a "maybe" about Black Mesa.)

So anyhow. Tried to select a number of piano covers, and made a conscious effort to bring back some of the same themes (in the way a concerto might) by showing off different covers of material from the same games. And I tried to focus in on games I've played myself but not only aren't there a lot of offerings there but that would leave off some of the great stuff like Skyrim, the Final Fantasy series, and of course Zelda. And I shuffled and shuffled to get a good flow, building up tension and relieving it, contrasting styles while maintaining certain continuities to help one track follow another.

Tried, too, to include some of the contexting. To show the penetration of game music into church choirs and high school marching bands, the intense fan interest, the stature of acoustic instruments and vocalists and life performance and the cross-cultural world community (as contrast the possible stereotype of nerdy white guys tinkering up music tracks in MIDI). And show too the social networking, the recording and collaboration and jam sessions that take place through the online world.

What I really wish is a little more space than a CD. I have five hours of the stuff already on my hard disk (I auditioned twice that many before making even that selection, and that's barely a quarter of what turned up in my rather basic searches). But then, dad will probably turn off around the middle of the second track anyhow.

So now I just need to find the Ukulele music I promised...

USB...A

What did I say earlier about "gotchas?" Well, this time it wasn't an unknown unknown. It was a perfectly-well known unknown.

I was cleaning up the silkscreen on my latest PCB. Couldn't get the SMD-type USB connector to look nice. But while I was working on it...I realized I'd never checked it against the actual sourced part. Which, upon examination of the engineering drawings, turned out to be...a through-hole. Serves me right for putting a part on there I hadn't personally vetted!

So once again into the mysteries of Eagle part creation.

And when that was done...realized this would be the first circuit I've made in years that doesn't have a blinkenlight for power status. I know; if it is working right, it will have a stack of neopixels for display. But that little status LED is just so durn handy for diagnosis...so back to the CAM files to stick another pair of 1206 SMDs in one of the remaining available corners.

You know what? Those 0805's don't look so scary anymore. I think this will be the last board I do with the larger SMDs. And if stencil and reflow go well, then...FTDI and beyond!

And the board passed the DRC -- with some modification of two of the thermal pads/polygon fills -- and the order placed at OshPark. Now I just have to see if I have the budget left for the parts...and move on to working out the new art for the laser!

Riding Thermals

Show is over, and Holocron board is routed. Now I just need to add fill polygons and thermal vias to help with the heat around the charge circuit components, run the Design Rules checks, clean up the silkscreen, and generally inspect and clean up all the layers preparatory to sending out to the fab house.

Haven't decided if it is worth doing a few parts with syringe and soldering iron or just go straight into solder stencil and reflow oven. I'll be doing more boards, and I'm committed to using a lot more SMDs going forward. This one's basically populated with 1206's and SOT-23's, plus some through-hole parts, but the Wraith Stone is going to go down to at least 0806 if not 0603's.

Not that I've really built up my Eagle library yet. Only a few parts on this board are verified footprints (aka, I already had a board fabbed with them and everything worked).

I may even start putting an FTDI chip on my Arduino compatibles. It's only a 20-pin SMD, not even fine-pitch.

Chapter Adverse

Under the weather and staying in today. And I have -- despite all experience to the contrary -- fond hopes I might finish the schematic for the Holocron board/ducklight ver. 2.

Not the PCB itself; I have some realism! I need to play with heat profiles and thermal vias, double-check footprints, and of course clean up the silkscreen...and I haven't even routed the board yet.



So of course I'm taking a short break to think about the next chapter in the fanfic.

If I had a proper outline, I'd have a pretty good idea what had to happen in each chapter. The same exercise, after all, takes place fractally within each chapter, within each scene, down to the line of dialog or sentence of description.

As an example, in my last chapter I had a "bit" I wanted to do; Alister gets talked into learning how to shoot, but unexpectedly turns into one of those gun collector types who go into raptures about Broad Arrows and Suicide Sears. This framed out as a series of snapshots where he brings more and more unusual guns out to the shooting range. A number of "beats," to use that useful bit of theater terminology. I needed Alister getting a bad start, Alister trying a different gun, Alister bringing out the first unusual gun, and finally Alister talking glibly about his latest unusual gun. As it worked out, I built those beats around several specific handguns; a SIG-sauer P226, a Colt Police Positive, a Whitney Wolverine, and a Nambu Type 14. With a Gyrojet for the payoff gag later.

Between those scenes would be more dry history lesson, so I'd planned to send some mooks into the manor and have a nice knock-down fight to finish the chapter on a high note. Except that this parallel structure, in which each Alister scene was followed by three other scenes, drove my page count too high.

This is the problem of writing serial style. I know where I'm going and approximately how long it is going to take, but the details I'm figuring out only a chapter or two ahead.

So now the exercise is looking at how many "beats" there are in the fight, and seeing if these stretch out to fill a chapter, or if I have to add other business. And there's another problem. Once the fight is over I've got several revelations I can make, and that will pad out the page count, but I don't want the climax of the chapter to occur around the middle.

For pacing reasons, then, I'm contemplating having the discussion of who the heck Amanda is while the armed men she has sent are still crawling around the manor looking for the Wraith Stone. And there's the planning at the moment. I have "bits," but I don't have beats. Daniel has to talk a mook down. Teal'c has to show off his mastery of the manor's hidden passageways, and the gyrojet needs to be taken down from the mantlepiece and fired a few times.

Once I've broken it into beats, and arranged and interleaved them in a way that supports the overall arc of the chapter, I can do a little division and see how close I will make it to my target word count this time.




And it is midnight, and I still feel awful, but the schematic is almost finished -- just need to add the resistor ladder for the function buttons, the resistor for the capacitance sensor, and a couple more decoupling and power smoothing capacitors. Oh, yeah, and figure out a footprint for the mercury tilt switch I managed to score on eBay.

Bits

Cobbled up a script light using one of the DuckLight prototype boards. Made a flexible stand with an eight inch length of armature wire from the art supply store, and the neodymium magnet from a 1" tweeter as a base. I'm having odd issues with the software, though -- there's a noticeable flicker, and I'm pretty sure the chip is running at 8 mHz. This is something I need to solve to make the circuit truly useful. But at least I can see my cues on my current show.

I'm also re-thinking the button scheme once again, in that if I can get the software working on the Holocron, I think it might just provide enough control for many of the "quick, find a light to put in this prop" applications. It is a lot of programming and will be fiddly to use but with three buttons I should be able to select color and among several nodes; steady, pulse, flash, swirl, and flicker.

Adding the option for interactivity is harder. But...I just realized I can add another mode by polling the buttons and taking any voltage outside the range the programming buttons supply as a valid input. So it might be simple to add a one-shot trigger mode. Less simple to add an intensity control (unless I've got another analog input lying around I haven't remembered).

Related to this, a family of megahertz-range radio modules has just had a decent software and hardware infrastructure built for them, so there is an option now that is cheaper and has a better transmission range than the XBee modules I've been using up until now.



Managed to take the class on the Universal Laser and can now laser-cut and engrave at TechShop again. And sold off the last of my stock of Aliens grenades (I still have a few mostly-finished bodies around). The show I'm working closes next week and I'm really looking forward to having no theater for a while and being able to get more prop work done.

Rice Surprise

One of the tricks of engineering is to know what you need to be looking for. The entire Holocron project has been an exercise in belatedly realizing one thing after another that needed to be researched and calculated and worked out.

I was so sure I was on track to start slapping down components. Then while I was re-reading the pdf on the lithium polymer charge monitor chip I'll be using (a cute little SOT-23 package), I realized the programmed pattern of conditioning charge and monitor before delivering full charge, and the taper off to maintenance charge, were all going to play badly with the requirement of the rest of the circuit to suck power for the LEDs.

It took only a moment of googling to discover this was properly called a "Load Sharing" problem, and articles had been written and circuits proposed to deal with it. Meaning I need to add more components to the board. And as I discovered when I checked my Eagle libraries, meaning I needed to source the parts, get their footprints into Eagle...

(I also worked for a while trying to make the footprint work with the through-hole neopixels I'd found. Looked for a while at SMD versions, but couldn't figure out how to properly surface-mount on the back side of the PCB. Looked for a while for pre-wired strings and finally decided on a minimal breakout board that could be easily assembled into a string with ribbon cable. Once I've made my final decision on a supplier for that, too!)




And then there's times that empiricism is close enough. I've done so much trick-line rigging, I knew before I walked into the theater I could use span-sets (rather, some slings from my rock-climbing collection) as supports and quick-links as pulleys. I also knew I'd need a little weight to drag the line back down to the ground after we'd put it away the previous night. So with about twenty minutes to go I finally got around to stitching up a tiny sand-bag. Which I filled with....rice from the kitchen.

I don't call it impossible that there might be some strange interaction between rice, nylon, canvas, the steel of the old building, or whatever. Or some unusual factor like hungry bats or a lightning strike. If I was doing this rigging on a ten million dollar satellite you'd bet I'd check every wacky suspicion that occurred to me. But for this, for a two-week run of a lightly-attended show in a black box theater, none of the plausible failure modes are of high enough probability to worry about.

It's the holocron -- which will be available both as kit and fully assembled board to purchasers -- that I have to get it right. And more and more I think that with the first one I just plain got lucky.

The Internet of (Theater) Things

I was at Maker Faire this weekend, and like so many other parts of the inter-tubes it was all IOT, IOT, IOT. And I'm wondering if it is time to rethink the usual objection to using Wifi in a performance context.

The old assumptions were that wifi wasn't reliable enough for performance. But then, we used to assume computers weren't reliable enough. I have seen the pleasant glow of the Blue Screen of Death from a sound booth or two, but I ran into many, many more people over the years who insisted on using tape, cassettes, or (eventually) CD's for effects playback because they didn't trust that a computer wouldn't break on them.

Well, I think most people have moved past that. Computers have become the default for sound playback as well as video playback. Crashes still occur but they tend to get ironed out in Tech; the show-stopper failures I have personally observed have been due to the batteries running dry on a production laptop.

I've seen a slow movement towards acceptance of iPad links to sound boards. I remember when the Yamaha board was iffy at best, but now that Wifi link is considered reliable enough for use in the time-critical environment of Tech and Sound Check on a professional-level show.

(On the other side of the technology-adoption bell curve, I've personally run numerous productions with laptop and software tools due to not having the budget for rack-mount equipment. Sub-mixed drums for one musical on the laptop, and that worked well enough that on a later production I few all of the sound reinforcement through it, using freeware plug-ins within Reaper to achieve a graphic equalizer for the house speakers. My last show, I was running sound effects, projections, and even running lights from the one laptop. And I've seen a lot of this sort of exercise in similar improvised micro-budget shows.)

After all, some of the oldest documented theater technology was borrowed and adopted methods from Elizabethan-era sailors; rope rigging, counterweights, whistle codes. It's a natural path from there to modern techs using cell phones to communicate to back stage (instead of trying to come up with the money for the old-school hardwired headset systems). And a lot of people are using DAWs for sound manipulation or MIDI hosts for live keyboards, or (again on the other side of the technological bell curve) personal music players or similar software like iTunes for backing track and effects playback.

In fact, at some levels of theater it is considered ordinary and natural to plug an MP3 player into the sound board and hit one of those little fiddly buttons at the exact instant called for in the script. (Putting the sounds on the hard disk of a computer with sound playback software that was specifically written for performance use is the more reliable alternative now!)



Which brings us to a segue. Effects -- or more broadly, all the possibilities of both the established ideas of theatrical lighting properties and scenery, and the less widely accepted ideas of interactive technology -- are not exactly called for in the script. One even suspects that in the golden age of musicals and old chestnut standards, the Annie and the You Can't Take it With You, the writer brought the same awareness of what could be practically done with multiple settings in scenery and quick-changes in costumes to what could be achieved in the way of on-stage telephone calls and so forth.

Which is to say, most shows don't require really clever technology to get a sound or lighting effect to happen in the right spot. Between the way the script makes the timing of the effect non-critical, and the way the presentational aspect of the box set with the missing fourth wall et al makes playing a telephone sound out of a speaker appropriate and sufficient (or at least sufficiently appropriate), there isn't a need for something more elaborate.

At least, not there. When you get to more modern works, and better yet, to those experimental works that straddle worlds of dance, improvisation, performance art, et al, there are plenty of spaces to explore more complex interactions than "play back a sound effect at a specific moment in the dialogue."

Of course, these also tend to get worked out in development. Sometimes I have had a performer or a puppeteer or a musician or whatever come up to me and ask, "I'd like to have this happen when I do this; is it possible?" But mostly, a choreographer or a props person or someone sees something interesting that's already out there in the world, and the performance is designed around how that existing thing functions; designed to accommodate the existing advantages and the existing flaws.

(Specific case in point; in a production of Wizard of Oz we used light-up globes extensively. Each time these were brought out, there was specific choreography to allow each performer to turn their back to the audience and page through all the available colors in these off-the-shelf devices until they got to the desired effect for that moment in the show.)

So it seems to me that the process of using the kind of effect modern electronics makes possible starts from the Designer. Instead of problem-solving something that the rest of the design team would like to happen, you become the one to suggest an effect. Which means you are effectively working out of what already exists or is known to be possible, rather than working from something that wants to happen on stage and developing a solution to it.



For that reason among others, I'm not that interested in the experimental end -- in the kind of process that puts accelerometer-controlled LED strings on a dancer, or whatever. Because as I pointed out above, this is more a process of adoption than design. You more or less start with available consumer products, and you develop a way to use them over rehearsal.

My interest from pretty much when I started using electronics in theater (where the height of my technological output was sticking leaf switches around a motor-driven cam to create a hardware string light chaser), is to, well, I'd call it "sweetening."

Here's a conceptual framework from another industry. A movie is more-or-less filmed MOS. In the older days this was a technical necessity, these days it is an artistic choice. Dialog may be taken from the shoot, but the totality of the sound environment in the finished product is a created thing. This is for focus and nuance; the noise is stripped away, and the only sounds still there are those that tell the story -- and they are pushed, too, for artistic nuance and emotional effect.

And this process has already begun in theater. We can't pan, zoom, or cut; we don't have that control over what the play-goer watches. But we do control lighting and we build and even paint scenery to place the eyes and the attention where we want it and to make essential story-telling and emotional points.

And artificial sound has entered. Even in smaller spaces, even in opera, subtle reinforcement and other acoustic shaping is already taking place. In larger houses and in the musical dialog is already passed through processing to make it larger than life in the same way Hollywood takes the best the boom mics and hidden lapel mics can carry back from the live stage, marries those with ADR done in the studio, and presents the final honed and processed mix to the audience.

At the very simplest level, I think we can now have the sound issue naturally from an on-stage walkie-talkie or phonograph or bugle (or appear to), and we can have the light from a television or cell phone (or the lights of other items of technology) doing what seems natural for them to do. The history of technical theater is full of examples of sticking colored lights in empty TV cabinets and sticking speakers under chairs and otherwise producing these illusions. Well, we can do them better now -- even if that means just pushing actual video out through a length of VGA.

But at the more complex level, I think we can have a gunshot sound "right." I think we can have a sword fight with the exiting (and thoroughly fake) sword sounds of a movie. And more subtly, I think we can treat voices and footsteps so the actors sound like they are walking a marble hall instead of wooden platforming.




But many of these require wireless control. Props move. Actors move even more. Cheap wireless is one of the necessary parts to make it possible to bring this sort of realized environment, this sort of naturalistic (or hyper-naturalistic) stage environment. And it may be that Wifi and the IOT has reached a point of maturity where it can be trusted in a production context. And not just on experimental theater pieces with fourteen people in the audience, but in staid professional theaters where your equipment breakdown is seen not by mostly your own circle of friends, but by hundreds of people paying thirty-five bucks a seat.