What did not work?
Most of it, honestly.
I do a lot of research on emerging technology related to media production. I would guess I spend too much time on it to be honest. But most of what I know to work well I learned through lots of failed attempts at what I intended. Often I discover many useful things along the way.
DMX Lighting
Pretty high up on my list of research topics is DMX lighting control from cloud. DMX is a big topic but its a decent way to control lighting in a live setting. I’d like to have OBS, Unreal Engine, or some other system control my local practical (real physical) lights.
For DMX to work over ethernet, instead of DMX cables, its typically packaged up in Art-Net or for big setups sACN. I’m trying to use Art-Net with a Quasar Science Rainbow 2. I was able to get control of it from Lightkey.app running on my laptop in my office. I have not managed to get any cloud control of it working yet though. The end goal is to wire up Unreal Engine to control my local lights to match the virtual setup in Unreal Engine.
I ran into some kinda bug with the R2 unit I have, stopped me dead in my tracks. It’s not bricked but the output is stuck off for some reason so waiting on response from support at Quasar Science. Really nice folks!
So DMX from the cloud - not working for me yet.
Dynamic Social Sharing Images
I hand build my website using a few tools and about two weeks ago I decided to implement social sharing images that get created automatically for each page of my website. The idea being that when I share a link to any page, it will have a nicely formatted preview image specific to that page/post.
Ultimately everything I tried didn’t work. This tells me, I am taking on too big of a problem as one piece of work. My goal is now to create the template I’ll use for the images in HTML and render that as a page of the site at something like /share.
After that is in place, I plan to use Zapier or similar to visit the URL, take a screenshot and append the image to the post as part of the build process automation. This will create an additional commit after I publish to the site which is hard for my mind to accept but I haven’t thought of another way yet. Perhaps, a locally run command on the development version of the site could also work. I’ll find out.
Dynamic social sharing images - not working.
That’s it for today, I hope some things are working for you! If not, just move on for now or “book a call with me” if you wanna talk about it. I know a lot about stuff that doesn’t work ;-)
