stage

12 Articles

Stage Lighting Hack Keeps La Bohème From Becoming A Dumpster Fire

October 22, 2023 by 20 Comments

With all due respect to the Utah Opera’s production of La bohème, we just couldn’t resist poking a little fun at master electrician [David Smith]’s quick lighting hack for the opera. And who knew an opera from 1896 would need a garbage can fire? Live and learn.

In what appears to be a case of “The show must go on,” [David] was called on to improve an existing fire effect for one scene in the opera, which was reportedly a bit “artificial and distracting.” This is a pretty common problem in live productions of all types; it’s easy to throw light at a problem, but it’s often hard to make it both convincing and unobtrusive. Luckily, he had both the time to come up with something, and a kit full of goodies to make it happen. A balled-up strip of Neopixels provided the light, with an Arduino running some simple code to randomize the intensity and color of the RGBs. [David] stuck with the warm white, red, and green colors, to keep the color temperature about right for a fire, and drove the LEDs with a couple of MOSFETs that he keeps in his kit to fix busted dimmer packs.

The overall effect worked well, but the holes knocked in the side of the greatly abused garbage can let too much light out, making the effect distracting on stage. The remedy was simple: a cylinder of printer paper surrounding the LED tape. The paper not only acted as a diffuser but held the tape in place inside the can. The electrical crew ran two circuits to the can — one to keep the Arduino running throughout the show, and one to power the LED tape. The former made sure the audience didn’t see the microcontroller boot sequence, and the latter gave the electrician a way to control the effect from the dimmer console. The brief video below shows it in action during a rehearsal.

Hats off to [David] and the whole crew for the stagecraft heroics and for getting this thrown together so quickly.

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Control Lighting Effects Without Programming

September 22, 2019 by 12 Comments

Working in a theater or night club often requires a specialized set of technical skills that you might not instantly think about. Sure, the audio system needs to be set up and managed but the lighting system is often actively managed as well. For simple setups, this is usually not too difficult to learn. With more complicated systems you will need to get elbow-deep into some software. With [trackme518]’s latest tool, though, you will only need to be able to edit video.

Sure, this sounds like just trading one piece of software for another, but it’s more likely that professionals working in lighting will already know how to edit video rather than know programming or complicated proprietary lighting software. All you have to do to control a set of lights is to create a video, or use an existing one, and the lighting system will mimic the video on its own. If you do know programming, though, it’s written in Processing Java so changes aren’t too difficult to make.

The software (available on the project’s GitHub page) will also work outside of a professional environment, as well. It’s set up to work with DMX systems as well as LED strips so you could use it to run a large LED display board using only an input video as control. You could even use it to run the display on your guitar.

Photo courtesy of Rob Sinclair (Gribiche) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]

Lighting Tech Dives Into The Guts Of Laser Galvanometers

June 29, 2019 by 12 Comments

There’s something magical about a laser light show. Watching that intense beam of light flit back and forth to make shapes and patterns, some of them even animated, is pretty neat. It leaves those of us with a technical bent wondering just exactly how the beam is manipulated that fast.

Wonder no more as [Zenodilodon], a working concert laser tech with a deep junk bin, dives into the innards of closed-loop galvanometers, which lie at the heart of laser light shows. Galvos are closely related to moving-coil analog meters, which use the magnetic field of a coil to deflect a needle against spring force to measure current. Laser galvos, on the other hand, are optimized to move a lightweight mirror back and forth, by tiny amounts but very rapidly, to achieve the deflection needed to trace out shapes.

As [Zeno] explains in his teardown of some galvos that have seen better days, this means using a very low-mass permanent magnet armature surrounded by coils. The armature is connected to the mirror on one end, and a sensor on the other to provide positional feedback. We found this part fascinating; it hadn’t occurred to us that laser galvos would benefit from closed-loop control. And the fact that a tiny wiggling vane can modulate light from an IR LED enough to generate a control signal is pretty cool too.

The video below may be a bit long, but it’s an interesting glimpse into the day-to-day life of a lighting tech. It puts a little perspective on some of the laser projection projects we’ve seen, like this giant Asteroids game.

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Pinball Wizard Hacks Table For Tommy Stage Show

July 7, 2018 by 9 Comments

Ever since he was a young hacker
[Mark Gibson] has messed with the silver ball.
From Soho down to Denver
he must have fixed them all.
But we ain’t seen anything like this
in any amusement hall.
That darn devious hacker
sure hacks a mean pinball.

He hacks it like an expert,
Becomes part of the machine
Automating all the bumpers
Always wiring clean
His table plays by automation,
And radio control for all
That darn devious hacker
sure hacks a mean pinball.

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Motorized Stage Finesses The Microscopic World

May 19, 2018 by 12 Comments

No matter how fine your fine motor skills may be, it’s really hard to manipulate anything on the stage of a microscope with any kind of accuracy. One jitter or caffeine-induced tremor means the feature of interest on the sample you’re looking at shoots off out of the field of view, and getting back to where you were is a tedious matter of trial and error.

Mechanical help on the microscope stage is nice, and electromechanical help is even better, but a DIY fully motorized microscope stage with complete motion control is the way to go for the serious microscopist on a budget. Granted, not too many people are in [fabiorinaldus]’ position of having a swell microscope like the Olympus IX50, and those that do probably work for an outfit that can afford all the bells and whistles. But this home-brew stage ticks off all the boxes on design and execution. The slide is moved across the stage in two dimensions with small NEMA-8 steppers and microstepping controllers connected to two linear drives that are almost completely 3D-printed. The final resolution on the drives is an insane 0.000027344 mm. An Arduino lives in the custom-built control box and a control pad with joystick, buttons, and an OLED display allow the stage to return to set positions of interest. It’s really quite a build.

We’ve featured a lot of microscope hacks before, most of them concerning the reflective inspection scopes we all seem to covet for SMD work. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t shown love for optical scopes before, and electron microscopes have popped up a time or two as well.

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Visible Light CT Scanner Does Double Duty

March 17, 2018 by 21 Comments

If you’ve ever experienced the heartbreak of finding a seed in your supposedly seedless navel orange, you’ll be glad to hear that with a little work, you can protect yourself with an optical computed tomography scanner to peer inside that slice before popping it into your mouth.

We have to admit to reading this one with a skeptical eye at first. It’s not that we doubt that a DIY CT scanner is possible; after all, we’ve seen examples at least a couple of times before. The prominent DSLR mounted to the scanning chamber betrays the use of visible light rather than X-rays in this scanner — but really, X-ray is just another wavelength of light. If you choose optically translucent test subjects, the principles are all the same. [Jbumstead]’s optical CT scanner is therefore limited to peeking inside things like slices of tomatoes or oranges to look at the internal structure, which it does with impressive resolution.

This scanner also has a decided advantage over X-ray CT scanners in that it can image the outside of an object in the visible spectrum, which makes it a handy 3D-scanner in addition to its use in diagnosing Gummi Bear diseases. In either transmissive or reflective mode, the DSLR is fitted with a telecentric lens and has its shutter synchronized to the stepper-driven specimen stage. Scan images are sent to Matlab for reconstruction of CT scans or to Photoscan for 3D scans.

The results are impressive, although it’s arguably more useful as a scanner. Looking to turn a 3D-scan into a 3D-print? Photogrammetry is where it’s at.

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Rocking Playmobil Wedding

October 4, 2017 by 6 Comments

Many of us have put our making/hacking/building skills to use as a favor for our friends and family. [Boris Werner] is no different, he set about creating a music festival stage with Playmobil figures and parts for a couple of friends who were getting married. The miniature performers are 1/24 scale models of the forming family. The bride and groom are on guitar and vocals while junior drums.

Turning children’s toys into a wedding-worthy gift isn’t easy but the level of detail [Boris Werner] used is something we can all learn from. The video after the break does a great job of showing just how many cool synchronized lighting features can be crammed into a tiny stage in the flavor of a real show and often using genuine Playmobil parts. Automation was a mix of MOSFET controlled LEDs for the stage lighting, addressable light rings behind the curtain, a disco ball with a stepper motor and music, all controlled by an Arduino.

Unless you are some kind of Playmobil purist, this is way cooler than anything straight out of the box. This is the first mention of Playmobil on Hackaday but miniatures are hardly a new subject like this similarly scaled space sedan.

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