A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
24 October 2003
Tried to fire up all my halloween props last night. Lots of setup errors – the lightning strobe fired when i turned on my tombstone uplights; the tombstone uplights lit when I tried to fire the doghouse fog machine; the doghouse fog machine didn’t ever fire.
After much head scratching I determined that I had some bit errors in the DIP switches controlling DMX settings on the various devices. The doghouse address was off by 2 suggesting that the 2nd switch is shorted, and i never could get the strobe to respond to any programmed address so i turned all the switches off and it responds to its default address, 1. Not surprising that the gear is suffering from 4 years of wet fall weather here. I may need to replace a few items next year.
As of this moment tho, all lighting and effects are functioning – tombstone uplights; haunted tree; several banks of lightning effect lights and strobes; my four fog systems; and my two solenoids for animating my casket.
Also did a lot of pneumatic debugging today. My exploding cauldron is working nicely; my coffin animation is working. I had to take down my air cannon tho – it was WAY too powerful for my intended effect, I would have been driving everyone out of the yard. I need to rethink its use for next year.