Monday, November 30, 2009

How it all Works - Hardware/Software

The controlling hardware is a “Kit 74"(picture below) relay board which is a 8 output lighting controller that hooks to a PC and provides 8 individually controlled plugs. A computer is hooked up to the relay board with a parallel cable and the lights are controlled by the board based upon the software.

The software application used to program the lights is called "Vixen". The programming of the lights must be done for each channel(string of lights). For each channel we have to tell the lights to be on or off at the certain time period. The time is broken out into a tenth of a second, .1sec for each time period. As you can see in the screenshot below, a white square indicates that the channel is ON while a gray square means that it is OFF. For just a 3 minute song, there are over 12,500 decisions (180sec x 7channels x 10period/sec=12,600) that have to be made regarding the sequencing of the lights. For each minute of a song, it takes anywhere from 1-2 hours of programming time depending on the complexity of the song.



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