Its Wednesday the 22nd October and time to update the blog about whats been happening over the past couple of weeks. My time has been quite nicely split across various projects, across various disciplines. So from where i last left off i was back to the hangar at stave one to continue development of a which speed winch 3d control system which StageOne are developing for a client. Karl and myself spent quite a which ironing out various little niggles which always arise when doing a new product. Ive been writing the 3d control software for the user 3d joystick flying and Karl has been doing some rather clever work in handling data transfer for a smooth flight.
On the weekend, I somehow, and I’m not yet sure how it happened as we are all never in the same place at the same time, but I managed to catch up with my good mates Mitch and BigChris. We went out on the motorbikes around northumberland and i was riding pillion on the back of Chris. I wasn’t expecting him to be accelerating as hard as he did and yes I did shout some profanities the first time he took off and I was confined i was coming off the back. It was a top time catching up!!
On the sunday i was to travel down to London to do some video programming and playback for a gig for YeastCulture. But before that i had to go through all of my stuff to make sure I had everything and at this point i decided to empty my rucksack as it was big and heavy and i really count remember everything i had in there, this is some of the contents, mainly less 2 laptops and 2 power supplies.
So, from top left to right reading like a book we have:
- 5 Point + H&V Laser, for projection lineups Link
- Passport, take it everywhere.
- Oyster card, priceless for London.
- Coloured pens, everyone likes pens!
- Super lightweight packable running jacket.
- Red backed Bicycle cards for doing sleight of hand
- Matrox Dual head2go, used for this Yeast culture gig.
- Leap Motion used for playing and developing softwares.
- Pencil case of random adapter cables.
- Wera portable screwdriver set, So useful. Link
- Korg Kaossilator II for making noises and general entertainmet. Link
- Webcam, for debugging & developing softwares.
- Gaming mouse, my RAT Link
- Some video signal adapters, HDMI/Minidisplayport.
- Leatherman Skelltool, Lightweight Multitool Link
- CUBE BOT Link
- USB Light (Around cube-bot)
- Bosch PLR50 Laser Measure Link
- LACIE Thndebot SSD external drive FAST!! Link
- Led Lenser Headtorch, dimmable & Focusable Link
- DVI Parrot used for spoofing EDID signals.
- 3D Mouse, i use this with 3d modelling software allot! Link
- Pitor, my little blue mascot from Poland when I briefly toured with Jonsi.
- BOSE Mini sound link portable speaker, I LOVE this Link
It was acne easy start tot he day and I met David and Ian from Sound intermedia who were looking after all the live mixing and audio playback, and also Simon who was following the score and cuing the piece. I was there in the roll of video & projection specialist to set up the system, program Qlab and make sure it all worked. We had been given triple screen content prior to the show split across 3 seperate video files so to make things more robust i spent a couple of days rendering out all the clips in to one long wide file which ensured sync across the screens. This was prep well worth doing, allows with rendering out an hours with of timecode which was used on occasions where the conductor needed to keep track where he was in relation tot he score and the time.
Two days later we were in the queen Elizabeth hall in the South Bank centre. It was a relatively easy morning setting up, apart from one broken VGA cable which took a while to find, and then a successful couple of rehearsals during the afternoon. After rehersalsand before the show I met up with with Nick from Yeast Culture and it was great to catch up over fish and chips! The show went very well and everyone was really happy, a success! It was a really good few days working with some really nice people!
The following day I was due to travel back north to the hangar at stage one to continue on LED development but received a call off roy asking if i could go and help Ben on a job in Battersea as Jam who was meant to be there and an ear infection and couldn’t make it. So the following day i was with Ben and the rest of the chaps from stage one installing automation for an event for Youtube.
Everything went in smoothly and ben had a nice view from front of house! The automation consisted of 3 revolves each of them with a double sided led screen on. In sequence and timed with video and performers the screens revolved for presenters and performers to come on and off the stage. Once everything was up and running it all looked really good. I must say that the production company Flourish Creative were incredibly nice people and looked after everyone really well. It was tiring out to be a brilliant week!
Early monday morning I was on a train up to Yorkshire and then headed to the hangar to catch up with work on the current large LED project. This stage i was putting together the prototype power data distribution circuit boards, this time we had ordered to prototype PCB in red, mainly for my own amusement. After getting over a couple of silly errors it was all working swimmingly. Heres a picture of one part of the workshop, I have to apologise for to Jamie as even though i start the day really tidy, by the ned of the day it works out like this. Sorry Jam!
Later on in the week we were on the disused airfield next to the hangar doing some real word testing on the 3d camera flying system which provided some good feedback. Thankfully for the 3 days it was up the weather was SUNNY!!! Since we have implanted quite a few improvements, and I’m looking forward tot he next test.
Here are some beautifully machined pieces of aluminium, containing lights, these elite things are really coming together. These will be used on a project going live next year.
I haven’t really seen may faces recently, this was the latest one, diddy robot head on a hydraulic valve on a scissor lift. Nuurrrrrggg!
