I have a keen interest in electronics and have built plenty of personal projects using Arduino’s, Raspberry Pi’s and so on. More recently, I have used this experience to build custom set pieces for productions. Here are a couple of projects I have completed in the last few months.
“Departures: A Song Cycle” (Verismo Theatre) – Fast Forwarding Clock
“Departures: A Song Cycle” performed its fourth iteration of the show at Pleasance Islington in June 2016. In previous productions, a large clock with a conventional mechanical module was used. I was approached at the start of May to find a way of automating the clock to start running after the opening number and to fast forward to the next “morning” during the penultimate number. I settled on a small, high resolution stepper motor attached to the existing mechanism part-way through the drive chain, with an Arduino controlling it while taking OSC commands from QLab. I also added a couple of Hall effect sensors behind the face to keep track of the minute and hour hands, both with small magnets on the ends. The video below shows the clock in action.
“Schatten (Eurydike Sagt)” (Schaubühne Berlin) – Lift Displays
While working on “Schatten” as rehearsal lighting programmer, I built a system of dot matrix displays for an onstage lift to replace the displays that came with the set. The story needed the lift to be able to go between floor “-99” and the ground floor, so I put together a modular system based around an Arduino, again listening to OSC commands from QLab and driving the displays over serial. The production was due to be performed in rep at times over a five year period, so I incorporated IP addressing with hexadecimal dip switches and used widely available Cat5e cable to connect everything together. Photos of the system are below.
