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  • Author Author: kellyhensen
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#badass Woman Project Entry - Amy Worrall

Name: Amy Worrall

Current home town:  Coventry, United Kingdom

Did you attend university?  University of Warwick, B.Sc. (hons) Psychology

Current Job: Software engineer

Your favorite electronics projects from element14 presents or youtube :

Commander X16 (The 8-Bit Guy): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg-6Cjzzg8s

 

Your project:

I reverse engineered a USB device in order to make a clone of it using a Teensy.

I wanted to use an expensive theatre lighting controller, but couldn't afford it. So I hired one for a weekend, packet sniffed the USB protocol, and made my Teensy spoof the original device so that the official software would talk to it.

In the video I've tried to explain a bit about how USB works, as well as show the complete process I went through to clone the device. Hopefully this is something a little different, but still of interest to the Element14 core audience!

 

Links or files that support your project?

Will provide code on request. I've got some stuff on GitHub at the moment but it needs tidying up before I'm happy to publicise it!

 

Your Project video:

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  • in reply to a531016

    The difference is that I run ETC Nomad on my laptop. Apart from the fact I only have a license for up to 1024 channels (which is more than I need anyway), it's the same software that runs on all of ETC's consoles, even the high end ones.

     

    I've spent years learning ETC's software, and I've gotten quite quick at programming a show with it. When we're in the theatre, the amount of time I can spend on lighting is limited, and I have to do a lot of things (setting up, focussing, going through cues with the director) as well as programming the individual looks. The show gets programmed in advance, into a show file with cue numbers, it handles the transition times between states, it can do various effects, and it lets you make changes on the fly if a critical situation arises during the show then go back to the pre-programmed state.

     

    While I have in the past ran shows where I was manually controlling everything (one fader per light, a script with a bunch of pencilled notes, and wishing I had twice as many hands as I do), I'm rather glad those days are behind us. It works well enough if you have a dozen lanterns. It works less well when you have a rig of 200, and some of them are motorised and have 25 parameters to control, and the director wants the flickering of a fire, a precisely timed lightning strike out of the window, plus some moody stuff with the ambient lighting when the protagonist slowly discovers the antagonist's true intentions…

     

    That's a long winded way of saying, I'd love the challenge of writing my own lighting software to output DMX, but it'd take me years before I trusted it to run a show as quickly and reliably as ETC Nomad.