David operated a laptop terminal (lower left) in the booth while Drew controlled all the stage lights with a manual light board (right).

The laptop connected to this computer backstage through a serial link that we ran through some unused wires in the theater.

To do this: connect pin 2 to pin 3, pin 3 to pin 2, and pin 7 to pin 7. On a 9-pin RS232 connector, ground is on pin 5 instead of 7.

The red LED in the center of the picture shows that the ISA bus sent an address, I think.

The connection between the I/O card's interface cable and the long cables that run to the dimmer system.

You can look at the neato I/O card we built for this project. This card has 3 8255 chips for 72 bits of output. 5 bytes of those go to 5 D/A converters which create the signals for the
dimmers.

Drag left and right on this image to rotate the board (if the JS works in your browser):

Rotator program by Honeylocust Media Systems

Drew wrote a tiny program in C to control the interface card. A few perl scripts do all the rest. The computer runs Linux, of course.

I haven't gotten the final versions of the code for this page. We modified the software almost every night, and I haven't brought the new code to this machine yet (2003/2/10).

• bits.c - controls 8255's at 3 addresses
• fish - "fiddler shell"
  • dim.pl - functions for dimming and getting relays to route dimmers
  • motor.pl - functions for controlling the stepper motor
  • shim2 - rainbow effect (spawned by fish :)
• cues - all the cues for the show
• profiles - min/max profiles for lights (used by dim.pl)

What it looks like when the sun motor moves