dbuckley

I'd say "go for it", but I'm a bit late. Good luck.

I wonder how many sharks got fitted and fogotted as show relays....

I have one of these!!! Not used it much, mine was purchased from B&H and called a Bescor MP-1E. I concur it's rather a useful and low cost tool. Mine arrived with a fault, the power supply socket had a fault from the factory, but I wasn't about to send it back to the USA, so some rather brutal surgery resulted in the battery compartment being destroyed and a new power jack being fitted, so the warranty was well and truly voided on that item.

I've no idea what to contribute, so I'll just wish you well. But I will say that this is theatre's loss.

Why 612KHz?

Interesting, I didn't read the fine print.

 

I have it's predecessor as a multi-zone amp here at home, which has been going strong for easy 15 years, and it was ex-installation when I got it, so heavens only knows how old it actually is, and in my last house, I had a whole bunch of relays automating the analogue input selections.

 

RS232 or IP is the weird thing, a lot of the DSP based units have this in some way or other, but none of them are value-priced, and it's rare to have it at the level of "just" two outputs.

 

If one wants to be brave, one can still pick up Gentner/Clearone PSR1212's on eBay for a song, which are digital 12x12 matrix mixers, 8 mic/line with phanttom, 4 line, all balanced, 4 band eq, gating, group gating for conferencing, dynamics control ("AGC"), all output have gain normalisation for conference mode, eight insertable processing chains with 15 band EQ which can be used as a crossover, delay, up to 500mS, settable in time and distance, adjustable for temperature, and a proper compressor. And fully RS232 controllable, the protocol is in the manual. I have one of these, and the similar but less powerful XAP800, haven't used it for a while since the X32s arrived, but prior to the X32, it was an amazing, cheap, audio router.

 

Still need power amplification, of course.

It's about twice as much as you need, but the Cloud 46-80 ticks all the boxes.

OK, a pair of Ubiquiti Nanostation AC should do it, I'm assuming you can get the fixed one 5m up, and the portable one at least 1m up, with unobstructed line of sight, with a path length of 5 KM, with quite a bit of leeway. The receiver, 24V battery, 3AH should do, and a Ethernet to DMX converter, and a voltage converter to suit the needs of the Ethernet to DMX converter, probably 24v->12V, all these go in a IP68 "plastic" enclosure, preferably with a transparent lid. Mount an IP68 RJ45 for DMX out on the box, and a IP68 power switch. Only downside is the need to unscrew the box to charge the battery, but this could be avoided by another IP68 rated connector exposing the battery terminals to recharge the battery. May want an inline 3A fuse on the battery because it's the right thing to do.

 

Not ridiculously cheap, but fairly easy to assemble using off-the-shelf bits from the likes of Amazon and RS. You never mentioned budget!

 

Do you actually need to send DMX? Would cues do? Timecode? There have been alternative solutions to this problem which use less radio-intensive solutions.

 

E2A - The Nanostations will almost certainly run on 12V rather than the 24V that they specify and that the included PoE injector supplies, so a 12V battery could be used, removing the need for the 24V-12> converter as well. So the ubiquitous 12V 7AH battery becomes the obvious choice.

When you say "battery", the question becomes one of power budget, how long does it have to operate for, what's the recharging opportunity, and has does that interwork with the IP68 requirement. Really IP68? Submerged? Can the power pack part be disconnected from the wireless bit when not in use? Are there What are the size limits on the battery part?

 

The DMX over wireless isn't really that much of an issue, that's "just" ArtNET over the right set of Ubiquiti wireless point-to-point devices, in an IP68 plastic box, use the Ubiquiti link planner to confirm the link path, but what makes this approach possible is the power budget. If there isn't the power budget then this is a non-starter.

With no experience at all in the field, I was looking for a provider to do just this, for a one-off event, so a provider that didn't require a year's fees commitment was a per-requisite, and almost every provider required a year's signup. The only reasonable-looking provider I found that confirmed they would work on a month-by-month basis was streamingvideoprovider.com but they are a bit clingy, I've advised them in a quite strongly worded email that their emails are spammy and they really ought to stop that behaviour as they will really annoy people. But their platform, to me, bearing in mind I don't exactly know what I'm talking about, looked quite respectable. I'd welcome other opinions.

Hell, that's awful.

 

My only advice when fighting for one's corner is to focus on outcomes, because, after all, that's what punters and management pay for.

Be pretty handy next year though, because all the mapping got done this year. Just turn up with robot, unload, and watch.

I can't help feeling that these are largely a drama thing.

 

Yes, yes, of course it is, it's a fog machine.

I can't get past the voltage drop for the current draw. According to Gencalc, 1.7A at 50m on 1mm give a voltage drop of 3.82V. That's a big whack. One way around this would be more two more (can be very weedy) cores, and remote voltage sensing, so the delivered voltage is 12V, allowing for whatever voltage drop there is over the run.

In Hawaii, specifically, the Big Island, because of the observatories on Mauna Kea, they have had bylaws that mandate low pressure sodium streetlighting for many years, so I was intrigued by this announcement of the end of SOX lamps, so I went on a google mission, and they are converting over to LED, with improved outcomes. This is one of the few places that still has yellow streetlighhting, everywhere else has something approaching white these days.

Put another way, the length of 2.5mm^2 ring you can hang off a C curve breaker is significantly less than the amount you can hang off a B curve breaker (tables in the wiring regulations for this) with acceptable fault trip times.

 

Interesting. We don't have rings in New Zealand, and our regs don't (as far as I can recall, anyway) differentiate by breaker type.

And.... after a hundred odd days, it's all just gone wrong. We've had a change in our alert status, which now means gatherings are limited to 100 people.

 

Local theatre has a comedian (Ben Hurley, for those that know him) booked for a show on Saturday, it's a bit over 300 seats, so they're hastily rearranging the booking into three bookings at 5pm, 7pm, and 9pm, at less than 100 folks apiece.

 

Now, the real kicker is that there is an alert level update scheduled at (I think) 5pm Friday...

 

Edit: why can't I see spelling errors until after the preview has been committed?

Loved reading that!

 

Edited to add - a lot of folks in the music community are over Macs now, as the port situation on recent Macs is unmanageable, and it's getting too hard to rely on old Macs keeping running, so they are just giving up and adopting Windows. The problem is there is no acceptable genuine substitute for QLab (yet) in the Windows world...

This interests me:

 

I did toy with the idea of getting the breaker changed to a C-curve, but decided against it on safety grounds

 

What "safety grounds" would these be? I'm used to thinking of C curve breakers as normal, certainly that's what's in my house, at the theatre, my place of work, so I'm wondering why you are reticent to change from B's which are sensitive beasts, to the C. This is quite apart from a ring protected by a 16A breaker....

Even our usually useless media managed to discover Michael Baker, here's a quite lovely piece. Of course, because of the speed at which all this has happened, this now has to be seen in what is a historical context. It's lunacy; events that have happened this year are "historical context".

It's a bit odd being in New Zealand. We're currently Covid-19 free, Most of the rest of the world isn't. Life here has returned, after a period of several months of complete lockdown, in many respects, to normal. There are no masks, no social distancing, no restrictions on pubs, clubs, dining, cinemas, theatre, travel inside the country. You just can't (in effective reality) get into New Zealand, and if you leave, you're out. If you had a job that relied on tourism, one of our most significant service industries, well, there is no foreign tourism, so you are probably out of a job. Our leadership recognised that public health and the economy are not opposites, they are the same thing, and that if you don't fix public health, you won't have an economy. Almost al the economists disagreed, made dire predictions, and there is now a lot of humble pie being eaten.

 

Just today, our public health mastermind, and, it has to be said, hero, and the subject of many memes, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, in an interview on the radio this morning, noted that it was a matter of when not if community transmission would occur in New Zealand, which of course, everyone knows, but we're all a bit complacent about it, so it's been a bit of a reality check, we're going to have to face up to ourbreaks of Covid-19 in the community sometime, we can't keep it out forever. What will happen when it lands? I guess we'll be back to lockdown :)

 

In the meantime, our theatre group is about to decide whether to pull the pin on a production that will hit the boards November. If New Zealand's Covid-19 free status holds, the consumer confidence should mean that people will be happy to be crammed into our tiny 50 seat theatre. Or it could all go wrong at any point along the way. The fun life of a non-profit theatre group.....

Why bother? Us oldies will all be dead by then, the young are (apparently) immune & the rest of you will have already had it long before then .....

 

Well, it's not just us old arses dropping dead that are the problem: the young and middle aged that survive don't do to well either. The survivors of a run-in get to experience:

 

• 
  * Heart Damage
  * Lung scarring
  * Brain damage
  * Blood disorders including clotting and strokes
  * Kidney damage
  * Nervous system alterations (sensation changes, loss of control etc)
  * Long term conditions like Chronic fatigue syndrome (which is debilitating)
  

 

In summary, 87% of recovered patients reported at least one ongoing symptom.

 

Covid-19 is going to, and there is no other way to put this, fuck over an entire generation.

That's rather a powerful tool for not a lot of money.

One certain way to safely interlock suck dangerous lamps would be to interlock them to the alarm system.

 

In our little (50 seat) theatre, when the alarm is armed, all non-essential power to the whole building is killed, which means no worrying about a heater left on in the dressing room...

Sh'welcome. You posted your note whilst I was beavering away converting it :)