Lighting Control on Non-Windows Systems?

fgodfrey asks: "Being a computer geek during the day and a theater geek at night, I'm looking to combine the two and turn a non-Windows computer into a theater lighting console. All the products out there that I've seen (such as Martin's 'Light Jockey' and Rosco's 'Horizon') only seem to support Windows. I'm looking for a solution that works on Linux, or preferably, Mac OS X. It also would require a DMX converter (DMX being the standard in dimmer control protocols) that could plug into the computer. I'm looking to be able to run an entire theater show directly from the computer. Has anyone out there tried such a thing? Before anyone suggests X10, it is not really acceptable for theater lighting as it doesn't respond 'instantly' to commands and would require a ton of X10 boxes."

Comments

Re:Stick with dedicated hardware.

[swillden]

If you'll excuse an uninformed comment, it appears to me that your complaints aren't about PC-based control systems at all, but rather about the bad user interfaces on PC-based control systems.

In particular, it sounds like they make very heavy use of mouse-based control, when they should do as much as possible with the keyboard. With 100 keys, and tens of thousands of key combinations, a well-designed UI should allow you do do damned near anything, really quickly and easily, with just a simple keyboard.

The one exception, of course, is smooth changes. You asked: "how smooth can you move a mouse"? Actually, people can move a mouse *very* smoothly, over a relatively short distance side to side. But I suspect that the controls require you to slide up and down, since that seems to be the common orientation of sliders on window systems.

If side-to-side mouse movement doesn't do the trick, it seems to me that you could easily get some of the wheel and slider controls used on MIDI controllers and use those for smooth input -- that's exactly what they're designed for and nearly every PC can be connected to them.

To summarize: I suspect that a PC-based lighting control system could be excellent, if it had a UI that was constructed by someone who understood both UIs and theatre lighting.

OTOH, I don't know beans about either, so why listen to me?