Diary of an Automation Junkie

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to do a better job marketing our products. Five and a half years ago I was much more aggressive about sending out brochures and postcards regularly. Of course, back then we weren’t really making any sales so I had plenty of time on my hands to focus on marketing. Those efforts slowed to a trickle as production demands grew. Last year we sent out a single mailing in January and then nothing else. I think it’s dangerous to get complacent about growing our customer base.

As an experiment, we are going to send out a direct mailing once a month for the entire year and track the resulting interest and sales to determine how much our marketing efforts are worth. To liven up the experience, we’re rolling out 3 promotions during the course of the year that will be announced on postcards and on our site. So get ready, it’s going to be a fun year!

Just a quick post to point out a cool new feature in SpikeMark — Input Actions.

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Ok, I’m actually jumping over a more intricate bug description in this post just because I find this one too much fun to pass up.

I discovered a bug in SpikeMark that would spew out erroneous log message, but only after the computer running SpikeMark had been running for 25 days or more without a reboot. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been paying attention to the updates on our site, you may have noticed a flurry of activity recently. We added some new features to SpikeMark which I’ll discuss in another post, but we also have been tracking down some nasty little bugs. The latest rash of bug squashing has been centered around a theme, because multiple performances in various venues have been experiencing similar problems involving tight sequences of linked cues. Read the rest of this entry »

Preamble

I’m a gadget hound and have been keenly interested in the idea of tablet pc’s since they launched way back in 2002. In fact, I worked the launch event in NYC running the automation system for the show. I also would love to incorporate touch-capability in our motor control software, but have been chronically fearful of the small-screen, under-powered tablets available.
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A couple months back I had the pleasure of visiting one of the schools that is using our motion control gear. Like many schools, they use our system as just one example in a pile of automation systems. Since I fancy myself a technophile first, and businessman second, I think it is an excellent idea to have multiple flavors of automation systems available to students to learn the differences and similarities of a wide variety of systems. The philosophy behind our products is to keep the costs low and the interface simple, but this comes at the expense of some advanced features and therefore our stuff lacks some of the really cool tricks of higher end systems. Higher end systems from the big boys eschew cost in the quest to bring complicated effects to big shows.
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This past fall I began researching web frameworks for an application we’re working on. I spent a couple of months casually researching and trying out every option from Pylons, to Django, to ASP.Net, to Struts, to Ruby on Rails. In the end I settled on using Ruby on Rails, not out of any technical superiority of the framework or language, but because of the great training materials available and the community momentum behind it. Starting in November, I began studying Ruby on Rails in earnest and shortly thereafter began preliminary work on our new project. Along the way, I have tried a lot of different tools and techniques for using and learning Rails. Somethings have been really helpful, other things not so much. What follows is a quick itemization of the things I have found to be most valuable and the things that I wouldn’t recommend other newcomers waster their time on. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been given a bunch of USITT Stage Expo passes for the upcoming conference in Cincinnati.  If you (or someone you know) would benefit from a free Expo pass, drop me a line (gareth at creative conners dot com) and I’ll send you an invitation.

This past week I had the opportunity to work at the Ford’s Theatre in D.C. helping setup the system and train the crew using SpikeMark.  The guys at the Ford’s have used our gear in the past, but this is their first show running SpikeMark instead of Avista so they generously hired me to come down and do a little training.  The carpenters down there are all exceedingly sharp so the training was very easy, but it gave me the invaluable chance to see our system out in the wild.

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It was a banner day last week when we shipped our 1000th piece of gear.  Yep, serial number 1000 rolled out the door attached to a lovely new Stagehand.  I leaned over and said, “Ian, ring the bell, we just solid our one-thousandth product!”

He unenthusiastically replied, “We don’t have a bell.”

Oh well, I was impressed.