At my school we (as students) generally manage the whole technical side of things ourselves. We design and plot the lights and then operate the desk during the performance. Although I couldn't be happier about this it does pose a slight time problem. The drama department keeps the keys for the box (understandably) so the only times we can get at the desk are in the lunch break around other commitments. Naturally this makes plotting the lights a long and slow process which I thought could be greatly improved by some sort of remote control.
My half-formed plan is to have a laptop living in the lighting box which could control the desk. It's a Strand 300 console so there's no hope of screen sharing it directly or anything. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but REALbasic just came out with a new web app development thing which I was thinking of using to send keystrokes from a web browser at home to the laptop in the lighting desk and then to the lighting desk itself. Somehow the desk's VGA monitors would be hijacked and sent back to the remote controller.
It's obvious which bits are the tricky bits:
The latter is a little off topic for this forum, but ideas welcome there. For the former I was thinking of a microprocessor that could send signals down the cat cable to the console and pretend to be the control board. Evidently that's getting complicated and I have no idea where to start. Failing everything I'd just make a system of servos to physically press the buttons on the control board.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
My half-formed plan is to have a laptop living in the lighting box which could control the desk. It's a Strand 300 console so there's no hope of screen sharing it directly or anything. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but REALbasic just came out with a new web app development thing which I was thinking of using to send keystrokes from a web browser at home to the laptop in the lighting desk and then to the lighting desk itself. Somehow the desk's VGA monitors would be hijacked and sent back to the remote controller.
It's obvious which bits are the tricky bits:
The latter is a little off topic for this forum, but ideas welcome there. For the former I was thinking of a microprocessor that could send signals down the cat cable to the console and pretend to be the control board. Evidently that's getting complicated and I have no idea where to start. Failing everything I'd just make a system of servos to physically press the buttons on the control board.
Any ideas?
Thanks.