Today I spent all day at FSM working on lights. What was I doing? Well, since we re-designed the lights in the Prayer Room, we now have a bunch of extra LEDlights just lying around. (You know, those really expensive bright colored lights that everyone used to complain about…) However in order to get them to work at FSM I had to make the right connector cables, set up the DMX universe and re-program the light board. Sure, that sounds easy enough, right?

 Well no.

First it took me an hour just to make the cable. Then we couldn’t get the second DMX universe to work. So we then unplugged all of the regular lights to get the LED’s to work. Success! That worked, but unfortunately we couldn’t get the stage lights and the LED’s to work at the same time. Frustration.

So we thought, hey, let’s try to re-program the board. Sounds great. After an hour of pushing every button we could find…we crashed the board and erased all of the light cues for service. Bummer. Oh and now the LED’s won’t work either. Nothing worked. Flagrant system error.

Yeah, it was bad.

Another hour of trouble shooting and we figured out how to get the board back up and to get the program running again. Hooray! But the LED’s still won’t work at the same time as the stage lights. But then after one more hour hour we finally figured out how to set up the second universe! All that remained was one last hour of re writing all of the light cues for service in the morning.

 All that to say, I spent 9 hours today working on lights and I think I broke more things than I fixed. It seemed extremely counter productive. At the end of the night all we could say was, “Wow, I’m glad we figured that out!” And then took everything apart again and put it back together the way it was before we started. However, sooner or later LED’s will be coming to a conference near you!