RevueStatics

From 2009 to 2017 I had the pleasurable experience of participating in the UNSW Revue societies, mainly in a backstage / tech role. This entailed moving props, lighting, stage managing, set design, bumping in, hiring lights etc.

At some point in 2017 the desk supplied with the theatre died so we assembled a team of engineers/hackers to make a new one, as buying a new one was in excess of $10000AUD, far outside a student budget. At that point we had two desks; an ETC 48/96 and RoadHog 4; this software was designed to emulate the ETC48/96 with some functionality to encourage people to understand grouping for lights rather than using direct softpatching.

I was in charge of the Python gui; this would then call a bunch of API's to send out DMX to the proper theatre gear.



Mockup of ETC 48/96 next to new desk design. It's tiny!

The hardware was designed thoroughly to fit into a small roadcase. It was originally designed to run on Raspberry Pi, but performance issues arose so we used a tiny SFF computer running windows. Much better.

The GUI was designed to have cues on the left, live status on top right, and a "programming console" beneath. This was a huge improvement to the 2002 ETC console tech which involved people writing down their cues on paper and praying that everything worked.