themuzicman
Well-Known Member
Well, technically nothing went wrong yet. Our play opens next weekend, and I caught this problem in a rehearsal.
About 8 or 9 months ago, our telex system suddenly broke. We narrowed it down to some bad wiring in the walls, as our base unit runs fine as long as we string our own cable. The school has been slow to fix it, and has even said now that the problem cannot be fixed. For our current show, we needed a fast fix. Our sound designer found an old arts center willing to lend us their walkie talkies. They are older, but still better than the cheap motorola's that every family has, but look very much like the one's the school admin's carry around, and can send and receive anywhere on the school grounds.
Our school came with a Horizon Lighting System on the cheapest computer than can find. It is an eMachine of some variety, I never bothered to check the model because it sucks. Anyway, this board is prone to crashing, having cues jump out of order, and random lights will merge into every cue. For the last two weeks, more odd things than usual had been happening, but I really gave no notice. I would turn around to talk on my walkie talkie, and when I turned back around a blackout would have been cued, or something like that. One day during our last rehearsal I was running board and I noticed that every time I would tx on the walkie talkie, the house lights would raise a little bit, and when I released the button they would go off.
In short, there is no shielding around the computer, or just enough to protect it from itself. The extra output from the walkie talkie throws it out of whack and either every light it is connected to raises to around 10%, or cues will trigger, or menus will flash up. Either way, it sucks. I ended up having to wrap the computer in a roll of aluminum foil just to provide it some reenforcement. Now when people ask why it is like that, I tell them the aliens are trying to probe it, and hand them an aluminum foil hat.
unrelated to the problem: because our walkie talkies look very similiar to the schools (but are on completely different bands), certain teachers have taken to yelling at us for stealing school equiptment, and one even went as far as to say, "only people who shoot schools carry things like that around" and tried making me hand it over to him. These situations tend to be very humorous.
About 8 or 9 months ago, our telex system suddenly broke. We narrowed it down to some bad wiring in the walls, as our base unit runs fine as long as we string our own cable. The school has been slow to fix it, and has even said now that the problem cannot be fixed. For our current show, we needed a fast fix. Our sound designer found an old arts center willing to lend us their walkie talkies. They are older, but still better than the cheap motorola's that every family has, but look very much like the one's the school admin's carry around, and can send and receive anywhere on the school grounds.
Our school came with a Horizon Lighting System on the cheapest computer than can find. It is an eMachine of some variety, I never bothered to check the model because it sucks. Anyway, this board is prone to crashing, having cues jump out of order, and random lights will merge into every cue. For the last two weeks, more odd things than usual had been happening, but I really gave no notice. I would turn around to talk on my walkie talkie, and when I turned back around a blackout would have been cued, or something like that. One day during our last rehearsal I was running board and I noticed that every time I would tx on the walkie talkie, the house lights would raise a little bit, and when I released the button they would go off.
In short, there is no shielding around the computer, or just enough to protect it from itself. The extra output from the walkie talkie throws it out of whack and either every light it is connected to raises to around 10%, or cues will trigger, or menus will flash up. Either way, it sucks. I ended up having to wrap the computer in a roll of aluminum foil just to provide it some reenforcement. Now when people ask why it is like that, I tell them the aliens are trying to probe it, and hand them an aluminum foil hat.
unrelated to the problem: because our walkie talkies look very similiar to the schools (but are on completely different bands), certain teachers have taken to yelling at us for stealing school equiptment, and one even went as far as to say, "only people who shoot schools carry things like that around" and tried making me hand it over to him. These situations tend to be very humorous.