I realize there are
hand held electrcal calculators but I have never bought one yet. I do it the old fashioned way also and constantly have to remember which part of the formula to punch in first. I have both a PocketMaster and 20 year old Radio Shack Architectural calculator which is easier to use even if you have to smack it for all the keys to work at times. Even than and with a
Photometrics Handbook when you don't have the primary lamp featured, the calculations for what your beam will look like gets complex so such a program might be useful for design. Is or was there not a lot of these types of Light Beams type programs out there? A review of all the programs based on usability, how well they work with Cadd, and cost effectiveness might be worth further study and posting. What other programs are there on the market now?
But as opposed to a computer program for it, how about something
hand held that does this kind of stuff, especially something that will do the basic electrical formulas, simple rigging loads,
voltage drop, and things like converting metric to imperial.
Than if for me at least I would be interested in something
hand held that is able to calculate what the
color temperature and luminous output will be at a
dimmer percentage setting seperate from the computer. Say type in 100,000
Lumen / 2,800 K at 75% of 120v (even your actual
voltage as it changes things) and you get the new figure for it's output. But in something small enough to fit in the design/tool bag. Anyone see anything like this on the market? Much easier even with a dual
monitor to just grab the
hand held calculator much less when on your feet doing a figure. Dual tap
transformer, High tap puts out 12.5VAC, the Low tap puts out 11.4VAC, on a 12.8v Lamp that's 100,000 Lumens what would be the difference in output between the lamps? Yea it's 10% less
voltage but than you have to figure in the 3% less lumens per 1% of
voltage... That's a fairly simple figure you can put on a normal calculator but most calculations when talking with the designer and he asks what the difference in output will be are not that simple. Yea Yea, I know you can program a scientific calculator for such things - remember I'm a simpleton however.
Another nice thing to have on this calculator would be something like you have a
PAR 36 lamp with a 5x7 degree beam spread, what size is the beam going to be at 15'? Much less what the beam or
field angle would be on a 36 degree
Leko at this distance. Should be simple enough for a small calculator.
Also what ever happened to keyboards with built in calculators and displays in the number pad area anyway? Have not seen them since the 80s. While I like my Wave keyboard, I would not mind a simple calculator as part of it.
Just some musings from me.
By the way, on freeware:
GE
http://www.gelighting.com/na/specoem/tools.html used to offer Light Beams which was a free program for doing simple
photometrics outputs of single basic lamps. They stopped giving it away but anyone intrested in it contact me off
line and I'll try to
send you a copy. Need to quickly know how much light you have on
stage with say a FFN, it will let you put the X/Y distance in fairly simply than print up various reports on what the beam is going to do or copy them to various formats. They also used to have or might still have a free
voltage drop calculator that unlike the above Light Beams in being limited to a select set of lamps, could let you specify any data on the lamp than adjust it for
voltage.
Most of whats left on their free programs however are lamp cost effectiveness calculators or simple room lighting design software. They should have upgraded the library on Light Beams and added the more fixtures option instead of loosing it.
By the way, I also noticed that
Altman has a free symbols library available.
