QLab Cue Light System

[micpool]

Todays little Project. Make a Programmable Cue Light System in QLab that can use iDevices or Hue Lamps as wireless outstations. 

System needs optimising a bit for latency, although it's fine as it is for general purpose use and recording status lights etc.

QLab controlling Hue Bridge 2 directly. iPhone using Danuel Murfin's ShowPlay app which will play any audio or video media controlled by OSC or, as in this case, just display solid colors.

[micpool]

Cue Light states can be saved and replayed as cues

[micpool]

Here's some new cues being Made and updated.

[Seablade -]

This is kind of interesting to me, thanks for the work!  How reliable are you finding the hue lights to be (or the showplay solution though I imagine that should be fairly good)?

       Thomas

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[Patrick Spadrille]

On kind of the same topic, i have found a way to control from Qlab anything that is controllable from the Home app. If someone is interested, let me know.

[micpool]

On Sunday, October 24, 2021 at 1:29:47 AM UTC+1 Thomas Vecchione wrote:

How reliable are you finding the hue lights to be (or the showplay solution though I imagine that should be fairly good)?

Not reliable enough for safety critical systems, but otherwise as reliable as any wireless solution can be.  (Thats a general observation   based on 3 years experience of hue bulbs in a general domestic set up.)

Obviously, I only knocked the cuelight system together in a couple of hours yesterday, and it’s easily adapted for any  indicator system.  QLab is communicating with the Hue Bridge directly.  When I’ve optimised the system for latency, I’ll devise a rigorous test procedure, consisting of a few thousand cues to get a quantified reliability score.  I have  quite a good method for rapidly checking large numbers of tests. I trigger screenshots in the testing script, and ensure that the screen shows the output, which in this case would be a camera shot of the hue bulbs,  side by side with the QLab state which in this case would be indicated by the color of the cart buttons.. You can flip through all the screenshots quite quickly, as any discrepancy between the output and what QLab thinks it should be is immediately obvious.

Daniel Murfin’s ShowPlay.app is really good for any use where you want to display any image or video, or as in this case, solid colour on any mac or iDevice, under OSC control. It will also play audio, so is an ideal replacement for StageCaller. Again, I would test thoroughly before deploying in a show, but in the studio it appears very reliable.

Mic

[Andy Dolph]

How are you talking to the Hue Bridge from Qlab?

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[micpool]

--to set Hue Lamp ID 14 to red

set theLightID to "14" --id of light as string

set theOn to true --boolean

set theSat to 254 --number 0 to 254

set theBri to 254 --number 0 to 254

set theHue to 0 --number 1 to 65535

set theTime to 0 --transition time in 1/10s

------------------------------------

tell application id "com.figure53.QLab.4" to tell front workspace

set theBridgeIP to (get notes of cue "DATA") --IP of a Hue Bridge as string in the notes of a cue numbered DATA

set theUserID to (get q list name of cue "DATA") --UserID issued by Hue Bridge as string in the q name  of a cue numbered DATA

set thedata to "{\"on\":" & theOn & ", \"sat\":" & theSat & ", \"bri\":" & theBri & ", \"hue\":" & theHue & ", \"transitiontime\":" & theTime & "}"

do shell script "curl --request PUT --data " & quoted form of thedata & "  http://" & theBridgeIP & "/api/" & theUserID & "/lights/" & theLightID & "/state/"

end tell

[Seablade -]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 3:38 AM micpool <m...@micpool.com> wrote:

Daniel Murfin’s ShowPlay.app is really good for any use where you want to display any image or video, or as in this case, solid colour on any mac or iDevice, under OSC control. It will also play audio, so is an ideal replacement for StageCaller. Again, I would test thoroughly before deploying in a show, but in the studio it appears very reliable.

And that was my first thought as well when I read your description of it.  Good to know!

 

   Thomas

[micpool]

Here's a second version.

Although the original had a smart script which found which start cue had started the single script cue, and then read that start cue's notes, and parsed them  to start instructions for the relevant color cue light for each indicator device in the system. This  took a considerable length of time.
The new version gets rid of the clever dickery, by using a MAKE CUE script which just populates a group cue with 1 start cue for each cue light targeting the required colour. This makes the latency virtual zero when using GPIs or MIDI controlled relays etc. Good with OSC iDevice apps, and usable with Hue Lamps.

if If you need better performance with Hue Lamps , Hue has an entertainment API which sends the info for up to 10 lights as a single frame and can send 25 fps. It's more complex so I'm not going to do a version that uses this until I need to. But all the info to do this is in the Hue developers documentation online (registration required)

You can download the workspace here:

https://we.tl/t-0A6s9dTfLC

You need to put a Hue user ID Key  and the IP address of your bridge into the cue numbered "DATA" to get it to work

Screen recording of cues attached

On Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 4:00:20 PM UTC+1 micpool wrote:

[micpool]

And here's a screen recording of a cue being recorded then updated