Control Geek

Wireless DMX Controlled Staircase Lighting at City Tech

John Huntington — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:01:00 +0000

For our current production of Ex*Pgirl at City Tech (which opens tonight), we needed a rolling staircase with chasing lights. The unit has to be spun downstage and quickly placed and we felt that a multicable solution would have been bulky and unweildy. The solution? City Theatrical's excellent SHoW DMX system. (Oh, and a CNC router to cut the piece--I'll leave that to our TD, John McCullough, to explain).

There are 33 lights in the unit, 11 on each step. Lighting Designer Lucrecia Briceno came up with a circuiting pattern, and I laid out the system and got the parts ordered up. A group of dedicated students did the wiring:

Guns N' Roses Stage Collapse Video from Rio

John Huntington — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:44:05 +0000

Scary video of a pretty intense storm collapsing a stage at the Praça da Apoteose stadium in Rio from Bobby Jarzombek's Youtube channel:

Storm Damage Photos

John Huntington — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:42:31 +0000

I was at a WMI Wilderness First Aid class all weekend, during the crazy storm, but I did get a few pictures on the way to and from Sebago Canoe Club.

Here's our dock on Saturday night, just before high tide. The is only about a year old and has never been subjected to this kind of high water. The submerged part is fixed, the rest floats:

Ex*Pgirl at CityTech

John Huntington — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:19:39 +0000

At City Tech, we're doing a workshop of a very interesting (and fun) show: Paris Syndrome by Ex*Pgirl. Mark your calendars now!

Tickets are free, and I designed the control system for a wirelessly-dimmed chaser light staircase (photos to come) for

Behind the Scenes of the OK Go "This too shall pass" Video

John Huntington — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:28:30 +0000

No doubt, you are one of the six million people who have (as of today) seen this great "Rube Goldberg" video from OK Go (who were previously famous for their treadmill video):

Make: now has a great interview online with the makers of this video. The machine does run all the way through, although it took them something like 70 (!) tries to get the whole thing to work. One of the impressive things to me, from a control geekery perspective, is that not only does this contraption have to work, but it has to be more or less in sync with the pre-recorded sound track:

The Man Who Rode The Thunder

John Huntington — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:59:17 +0000

At the National Storm Chaser Convention banquet, I was talking to an interesting chaser couple from Kansas. The wife of the couple flies big Air Force refueling tankers, and the husband is a parachuting instructor. I joked that he should chase a thunderstorm by jumping into it from his wife's plane, and someone else at the table said someone else had already parachuted through a thunderstorm. A bit of Googling on my phone, and I came up with the name Lt. Col William H. Rankin, and his book, The Man Who Rode the Thunder:

Obama's Lip Syncing Fail

John Huntington — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:23:01 +0000

I've written about lip sync fails here before, but this one is really shocking:

Loser's Lounge Carpenters

John Huntington — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:59:15 +0000

I'm a big fan of the Loser's Lounge, and I go see them at Joe's Pub pretty much every show they do when I'm in town. I go even when they do a tribute to someone I'm not particularly a fan of, like The Carpenters. But it was great, and here's some pics from the early show last night:

Snowicane 2010 Time Lapse (Sort Of)

John Huntington — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:51:05 +0000

I set up my camera on the roof here in Brooklyn, hoping to catch a time lapse of the snow drifting. What I didn't count on is that the Snowicane would actually drift OVER my camera:

National Storm Chaser Convention/ChaserCon 2010

John Huntington — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:39:29 +0000

I had a great time last weekend at Roger Hill and Tim Samaras' National Storm Chaser Convention in Denver. I went last year, and this year again featured lots of great speakers, many of them giving us an update on Vortex 2 (unfortunately, the lighting was incredibly dim, so most of these photos are too):