The concept
The control logic used here has three parts: channels, scenes and a sequence. This is about how they work together.
Channels
A channel represents a physical output of your dimmer output stage, whatever you use there.
All you can do for now in GlowControl is giving it a name for clearer arrangment later on.
Future version of this software might have a selector for choosing from one of multiple
output stages, routing etc.
Scenes
A scene is like a snapshot in your theater show, a momentary list of all states of all channels. Each of them holds a value for each channel and can have a name.
Sequence
The sequence is basically a list of actions that are executed in sequential order. There are four types of actions at the moment:
- Crossfade (dimm) to a given scene. You can specify the amount of time (in milliseconds) this action should take.
- Sleep for a given amount of time (in milliseconds).
- Wait for external syncronisation.
- Start playing a given audio file.
Known issues
This piece of software is not (yet) very sophisticated and more or less a quick hack that had to work in
a very specialized environment. It's therefore not modulized and has a bunch of rather hard-coded
things in it. I hope these issues to get fixed in future releases.
Some points of weirdness I know about:
- The timing is not syncronized to any clock source. The algorithm is written to work on this very notebook it intended to be used on. You'll probably need to adjust the value coded there to get exact timing on your machine.
- External syncronization (wait for something on the stage to happen) was programmed to work with Keyspan's USB remote presentation stick. If it's not found on startup, you'll get an annoying message. Furthermore, there is no support for any other hardware yet. It's however easy to change this.
- Sound playback is done by an external programm, mpg123, it's not done natively. You need to have installed it.
- There is no way for stopping an audio file once it was started. Pressing the stop button simply kills all mpg123 processes.
- The number of channels is hard-coded, not configurable by an elaborate interface.