[LCtalk] Wing / programmable keys

[P. Koelman]

Hello list,
I just want to share my experience.

I did a lightshow last weekend for a gospel choir, not enormous, but big 
enough for me.  I set up 24 dim channels and 4 moving heads.

For the first time I used the Xkeys editor Jog&shuttle Pro from P.I.  
engineering (http://www.xkeys.com/xkeys/xkedit.php ).  Just a bunch of 
programmable keys and a jog/shuttle wheel.
I thought this would be a lot quicker both in plotting and live.  It 
actually uses 2 'layers' indicated with a green led and a red led, so 
for the plotting you can program actions under the red layer, for live 
you can use the green layer.

When used properly this is indeed a big enhancement, when the jogwheel 
is assigned to the arrow keys it makes it ideal for positioning 
movingheads and setting statics. And in combination with the shift key 
it speeds it up as it would with normal arrow keys.
With the arrow keys assigned to the jogwheel it also makes it a lot 
easier to scroll through long lists (as the mouse scrollwheel doesn't 
work in LCedit)

The only mistake I made was to create the macro's using the Xkeys 
program, instead of creating macro's in LCedit and assigning them to a 
key. I ended up with long keystrokes in the xkeys program with a few 
going wrong causing an exeptional error in LCedit, not nice!
I worked around those 'wrong keys' during the show so everything went 
well.  For the futur I know now to use LCedit more instead of the Xkeys 
keystrokes.

What I found to be a boundary in this setup is a short-key to things in 
the advanced panel, for example to manually set the transparency I 
needed to use the mouse to click the field first, and than jog to the 
wanted position.

Live I had the frontlights under a key so I could manually set the 
frontlights as needed. I made it to select the frontlights layer and 
select the fixtures acordingly. So one press on a button and I could 
immediatly jog to the desired value.

I think there is much more conveniance with this.
Does anyone use a similar setup, and if so, how do you use it?

Kind regards,

Peter