#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:

Top Comments

amyworrall over 5 years ago in reply to dougw

The pages are how many parameters are laid out over four encoders. The light I was using has, for example: pan, tilt, focus, colour wheel, intensity, gobo select, gobo shake speed, gobo rotation, prism, prism rotation speed, strobe effect speed/type, and probably some others I have forgotten.

If I did use the official API, I could have written my own pagination logic (since you just tell it what parameter to adjust), but then my encoders would not have matched what was on the screen.
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dougw over 5 years ago

Great project and awesome production work. I can imagine how much time and effort it all took.
Does the software always require that you switch pages, or could you have a way to automatically switch when an appropriate encoder moves?
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amyworrall over 5 years ago in reply to makerkaren

Awesome! I’d love to visit sometime, but I’m far away in the UK.
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makerkaren over 5 years ago

Fun fact, ETC is in Middleton, which is right next to Madison, where I happen to live in Wisconsin! I once went to an IEEE meeting at their facility and got to take a tour. It was super cool. Though since I'm a big theater nerd, I ended up geeking out and swapping theater war stories with an employee during the tour while they were showing us the area where they hang and test lights.
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KalebTheMaker over 5 years ago

Well done! Extremely detailed in a specialized field. I did some lighting and sound for theater waaay back in what seems a different lifetime, but it was nowhere near that sophisticated, DMX was the only option we had.

Building things out of necessity is my favorite thing. Keep it up, good work.

-Kaleb Clark
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davedarko over 5 years ago

That intro was a great teaser for the project and is on point with the humor of the other VCPs

Fun to watch, pacing is great - even though I've never done something like that and might not have understood everything - I was trying to follow everything!

Great video, thank you for taking part in this!
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