Personal Accomplishments
This week, the Gigbar 2 light that we ordered came, and I was able to begin properly testing my functionality. I spent the majority of this week figuring out how the lights worked, playing with the inbuilt programming of the lights, and using the DMX input to control the lights. The light set has two pars, two derbys, a laser and a strobe bar. The DMX input allows me to control each individual fixture independently. This is promising because the inbuilt programs are pretty random in their selection of what lights are on at any given moment, so with this fine degree of control we should be able to do much better than any preconfigured program. An example of this lack of inbuilt control is the fact that you cannot select certain lights and set them to a function. For example if I want the pars to just have a static color displayed and the derbys and the lasers to flash, I cannot do it. So being able to actually test the lighting control and compare it to the inbuilt programming was very helpful.
On Track?
For the most part, I am on track. I think that there is a little bit of extra work I will need to put in to figure out exactly how I want to map inputs to actual sound inputs to lighting decisions. I can try to build it out now but I also want to get a sense of exactly what the signal processing outputs are going to be since those will be the triggers for the lighting calls. I hope to have this done over the next two weeks so that we can begin integration.
Goals for Next Week
For the next week, I want to be able to have the entire lightest running and create some basic preprogrammed shows through the lighting engine. Then I will start working on using the sound inputs to create sound active lighting shows. I think that it is a good subtask to try and manually program effective light modes that are not sound active just to test that the system is working so far.