ENIGMA

[schmod]

If anybody feels like bashing their head against a brick wall for a weekend, our beloved ENIGMA is in serious need of reprogramming.

A sizable portion of the programs either don't do anything, kill all of the lights in the venue, or correspond to lights that either don't exist, or have been moved from where they were hung when the program was written. The arrangement of the desks also isn't particularly optimal at the moment...

Any volunteers?

[Spike]

Thanks for the heads up, but as far as i can see it is still working just as well as it always has.

I wouldn't say it is that dire at the moment, people just need to not rely on master programmes and change movements on the lights individually (desks 17-19 etc). Also to fully reprogramme the desk would be more than a weekend job, probably a fortnight to be honest (thats with snagging included). mIf you are interested the manual for the enigma can be found at
this site here

hope you have a good one, and thanks for the heads up nonetheless

[schmod]

Hmm. Yeah. Reading the manual seems to indicate that making any sort of "overhaul" might take quite a bit of time, and I'm getting a bit more accustomed to the Enigma's quirks...


For now, we should probably concentrate on eliminating/fixing programs that are outright bad or incorrect (eg. ones that kill all of the lights in the venue). Fixing the par chases so that they correctly correspond to their names would be nice too, and shouldn't be all that hard to do.

17-19 are good, and I wouldn't change much about them...

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that a bunch of the motion presets on 17-19 don't actually make sure that the shutters are open, and that the dimmers are sufficiently turned up, in the event that a previous .

On, and on desk 18 one of the ProSpot (I think... whichever is first column from the left) color presets is wrong -- red and blue are backwards IIRC. Not dire, but also something that's trivial to fix....

[Spike]

the chases on the pars is not a desk issue, its a patch issue.

[alhaynes]

The Enigma is something I did look into and the following points are important:

• 1. A simple setup (10 minutes on the Pearl) will take about three hours on the Enigma. To do a decent rebuild will take weeks.
  
  2. Changing the patch is difficult and may result in the loss of many programs in the desk. Changing the output channel of a fixture is about as much as can be done safely.
  
  3. The patching system is unique and arcane and thus simple changes are not as simple as you think (e.g. this channel is empty, lets add a generic light here may be far more complex than expected).
  
  4. The patching/configuration system is more volatile than the front end and without care the whole desk may be corrupted. This is not a desirable option when our only backup is the Zero 88 Eclipse.
  
  5. Stage lighting (24 parcans) + all standard floor lighting was used for the second to last bop at the end of the previous academic year, and I doubt anyone has reconfigured the desk since then. The lights are therefore programmed into the desk - if the channels are wrong, it would be easier to remap the DIN cables after the DeMux 48 unit instead of repatching the desk.
  
  6. It is probably easier to get the Zero 88 Eclipse to control an intelligent fixture than it is to reconfigure the Enigma.

Things that are presently wrong with the Enigma:

• 1. The desk has the setup from before the channels of all the fixtures in the venue were repatched, but with the new patching - this was necessary to include the six new ProSpots.
  
  2. The Enables buttons are labeled incorrectly - if this is an issue, one only needs a pen, a piece of paper, scissors and a screwdriver to fix it.
  
  3. Up to three ProSpots are mapped to the same fixture in the desk - due to the new desk setup not having the full complement of programs, we are forced to use the one with these problems. (This is the most time consuming of all the problems with the Enigma.)
  
  4. The slide panel has lots of broken sliders.
  
  5. Some/many of the programs do strange things. As there is no delete option, many programs have survived from some event which has long since been forgotten. The only delete option is "delete all programs". Individually, each of these programs can be reprogrammed when they are found (most are on Desk 3).

[niall]

2. Changing the patch is difficult and may result in the loss of many programs in the desk. Changing the output channel of a fixture is about as much as can be done safely.

3. The patching system is unique and arcane and thus simple changes are not as simple as you think (e.g. this channel is empty, lets add a generic light here may be far more complex than expected).

As someone who has custom patched the enigma a few times for random events outwith the union, it isn't a quick option (at first, once i got the hang of it it's pretty easy). But, if you remove a light it will move the other lights on that universe down. So, for example, if you removed the Strobes, it will move everything down by 4 channels. and then will remove all programming for the lights on that universe.

[schmod]

Now I'm afraid to go anywhere near the thing