Orlando Trip #2: Repairs

Today Brendan, Rich, and Evan flew down early to Orlando to make repairs on the Purple Kiosk / Haptipotomus / Hipo and the Big Surprise. These repairs have been a long time in waiting. It seems odd that a group of students should be working on a support role for past projects, but frankly, we wanted to do it. GKTW can use all the help it can get, and when it comes to technical maintenance, they are in dire straights indeed. Also, the ETC offers no repair plan or anything like that on our work (again, we are students), but for a client like GKTW, we want to keep everything running.

So on to the day. After an uneventful flight and a quick stop at a Waffle House, we got to work. We simultaneously worked on the Hippo and the theater effects. It turned out that the Hippo's power supply was indeed fried. We swapped it out with the new one Electric Owl gave us, along with a new hard drive and DVD drive. The system booted and worked on the first try! With the live Linux distribution it took a while to boot, but once the system was up, it was astoundingly stable. There was one problem though, the X axis on the touch screen was swapped, so hitting the top left corner of the screen registered a hit on the top left. Luckily, it was a simple 2 variable switch in the code that Phil from Electric Owl was able to identify. We made the switch locally, and Phil was able to get a new disk to the rest of our team who was leaving Pittsburgh later that night. With that and some touch up paint, the Hippo was up and running!

Now for the Big Surprise. The first thing that we learned is that DOCUMENTATION IS IMPORTANT! It turns out that there was no documentation of what device/light corresponded to what DMX channel in the theater. We spent half of our time troubleshooting each hardware device, and the rest of the time trying to figure our what DMX channel each dimmer should be set to, and then what channel each device was. It was a lot of running the show, testing, plugging it in somewhere else, and trying again. We brought a label maker with us, so hopefully it will be easier to set up again.

What happened to the Theater was two fold. First, at some point over the summer, Disney was nice enough to donate and install a whole suite of new lights. The problem was to do that, they had to take the whole effect system down, and then re-assemble it. Needless to say, they didn't put it back together correctly again. The second problem was the electrical system in the theater. A lot of the outlets that were in use had been moved to a secondary DMX control system, and were not 'on' like they were before, so many of the effects were not getting power when they should have been.

We got to play on Scissor lifts, and got the whole system up and running after about 5 hours. A bonus was that once the system was working again, we learned that there was an audience interaction bubble-bouncing game that we didn't even know existed! Sweet.

The rest of out team gets in around midnight, and tomorrow we are off to SATE!