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.

It perhaps sounds strange to hear that I haven’t spent much time with the system out in the real world.  We’re primarily a manufacturing company these days, and to the product line’s credit, our stuff doesn’t require our presence on-site to install equipment and train technicians.  My goal has always been to produce equipment that can be sent anywhere in the world with just an instruction manual and be installed by the average Technical Director or Stage Carpenter.  As such, I don’t get out much anymore, but the few times a year I do it always provides great insight in what we’re doing right and where we’re missing the mark.

What I think we’re doing right

  • Distributed automation is still the right choice for the average regional theatre show.  When we launched the product line in 2004, people were a little suspicious of the basic premise.  Rather than having a big console and a rack of control and a rack of power amplifiers, our system uses a PC (often a laptop) and a Stagehand next to each motor.  As most know, the Stagehand has all the control logic and power amplification in one box.  This week while setting up, we were short some cable at the theatre and UPS was delayed delivering the additional cables, but we were able to test all of the motors by walking over to the motor with the laptop and a crossover network cable and plugging in directly to the Stagehand.  When the console is just a laptop, you can easily move the “console” to the trap room, backstage, across stage, or out into the house.
  • SpikeMark rocks!  I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it is sooo much better than Avista.  Avista was a good solid 1.0 version, but SpikeMark really streamlines the process of setting up and writing cues for a show.  We had a fair amount of time with no ability to run motors on stage because the electricians needed to focus.  So, we took the prelim cue sheet from stage management and marked all the distinct positions in the cues for each motor.  Then we made spikes for each motor that matched the positions noted in the cue sheet (On Stage, Down Stage, DS -1′, Walls Together, etc.).  We just guessed at position values for the spikes (19′, 248″, etc.) and then wrote all the cues referencing those spike names.  Later on, when we had 15 minutes of clear stage time, we jogged a couple of the motors around to grab real positions for the spikes.  We edited the spike position values in the motor setup pane and voila! all the new positions automagically updated throughout the show file.
  • The new Stagehands are tres kewl.  I hate the fact that the new Stagehands cost so much more than the old ones, but it does pay off.  The new Mitsubishi drives are smooth as silk.  We did zero, zip, nada, absolutely-no-friggin motor tuning.  The default SpikeMark settings of a p-gain of 1 was fine.  These were large tracking walls on a rake, not a small load, and the Stagehands drove them perfectly without any hiccups or lurches at the beginning of the acceleration.
  • The new dogs and sheaves work well.  Though the dogs could have a couple of tweaks to insure a more solid grip on the cable.  We had the dogs slide on the cable on the first few moves before we cranked them tight.  Cranking a screw tight into a hole tapped in HDPE gives me butterflies.  It worked fine, but I’m coming around to Ian’s urge to put some steel clamps inside the HDPE shells.
Things that kinda suck
  • Let me just say, on the record, I hate the limit switches and limit switch mounts on our Pushstick winches.  Occasionally, I make those really bad design choices that even smell wrong at the time, but somehow I don’t take a step back and push for a better solution.  Pancake, rotary limit switches are simply not a production ready device.  If you have a garage door that needs a limit switch that install once and set and forget, great.  When you’re struggling with a deck winch where the end of track changes on every show, they stink.  I spent probably twenty minutes bouncing between 3″ past & 6″ before the ultimate limit position as I tweaked the limit screws an imperceptible amount.  My original design goal was to have no belts, chains, or other mechanical linkage that required regular maintenance on the winch.  That lead to the stupid limit switch design we have now.  I need to come up with something better that achieves the maintenance goals but is more friendly for production.
  • The Pushstick winches should be more versatile in mounting positions for deck tracks.  Currently, the winch is really designed to lay flat if it is on stage and stand vertically if going in a trap room beneath the stage.  How about when you need to go vertical on stage and shoot the cables out the front ala the old standard Feller design?  Not so much… we should fix that.  I have never really liked the old standard upright winch, but it does work in a lot of situations, we should stop fighting that on some abstract ideal that I have and do it like they have been doing it for the past 40 years.  I still like the lay-flat winch in some situations, but the winch should accommodate either position.
  • As much as SpikeMark rocks, there were a couple of niggling issues:  when using the onscreen manual motor control, there needs to be a clear display of which motor you currently have selected.  I found myself bumping the wrong motor a couple of times because I hadn’t clicked in the cue grid to select the proper motor.  I think maybe just having a clear label with the motors name right above the speed slider could do the trick.
  • The speed slider in SpikeMark for manual motor control is still an unnatural sensation.  I really want a physical knob somewhere to jog the motor speed when I’m at the laptop (maybe on the Showstopper? maybe just one of those Griffin USB knobs?)
That’s about it from my notes.  What do you guys think?  What works well, what stinks?  Who wants to bring me out to their theatre next ;-)