What I learned today

[Brian Mitchell]

I was testing my show tonight to work out the kinks for tomorrows lightup and noticed something I thought was odd in the log file.

At the end of the show the background sequences do not end until after any shutdown sequences run. To me, logic says that the background sequence should end before the shutdown sequences. Why is that?

It creates all kinds of errors when I try to run the verifier because my background sequence is all my static lights and the shutdown sequence is a fadedown of the lights at the end of the show. This creates a channel conflict for every channel. Most of the time it works ok in the show but it does explain why once in a while I would get some strange flickers on odd channels during the shutdown.

Other than this the show is ready to go Friday night.

[bob]

The Background section runs for the entire length of the show, including during the Startup and Shutdown sections. If you don't want sequences to play during the Shutdown section, consider moving them from the Background section to the Animation section.

[Steven]

When the "Turn used channels off at end of each sequence" option was added, I removed all sequences from the "Background" tab, since now there are better ways of making a "Background" sequence.

For channels that I want to stay on the entire show, such as the X10 channel that controls my transmitter, I turn it on using a "Startup" sequence, and turn it off using a "Shutdown" sequence. Actually, since I have multiple shows, I just leave it on and turn it off once in the Shutdown sequence of the last show of the evening.

The one advantage of a Background sequence over a Startup/Shutdown pair of sequences is that if you turn on a channel in the Startup sequence, and then the network or power cable is disconnected from the controller, all channels on that controller will stay off until they're turned back on again. A Background sequence will do this every 30 seconds or so depending on its length. To solve that problem, I have at least one sequence in my Musical section with that channel and turn it on for the entire sequence.

In my show, I don't have any sequences in the Animation section because I flash everything to music (including my "Tune Radio to..." sign), but you may have things that would be good to put there.