Show Cue System

I thought I would mention an application that I have found useful in several situations.

I wanted to be able to start various pieces of music and effects from on
stage by the talent. To do this I wired a parallel connection to the mouse's
right button switch (inside the mouse). These two wires went to a socket on
the body of the mouse.

To this was attached the output of a battery operated 'wireless doorbell receiver' - the mini speaker being disconnected.

By trial and error I found the points on the receiver that, when a signal
was received, a normaly open connection became shorted. These points then were connected to a short cable and plug that fed into the socket on the mouse.

The transmitter, the 'doorbell unit, is only 2" x 1 1/2" by 3/4". It can
be in a pocket, vest, book or other prop. Uses a small 12v battery. battery. These units can change frequency by use of jumpers and several transmitters can be used from various points on the stage or carried by different actors.

The receiver is about four times as large (uses 3 AA batteries)

I'm using this arrangement with a laptop, playing into the house mixer.

The mouse still functions in a normal fashion. The built in laptop mouse is
out of the circuit.

A limitation is that each repeated item in the show needs to be programed seperately. As a one person application there is the limitation of not being able to play hot keys over items in the regular the 'que'. They must be programed into the playback sequence, but they can be triggered on a need to play basis. Again, what might be normally be a repeated 'hot key' item needs to be put in the show que as seperate cues. And you need to know how many times it will play - a certain lack of flexibility.

I've found this arrangement to be great to guarentee the syncing of sfx to specific action. And off topic a bit: I've used the same principal
during tech rehearsals to cue the light person as to the next light change
(triggering an 'action' light).

The whole arrangement came in at about $20 (US)

Bob Howard

I'll see your creativity and raise you some options for increased flexibility (including the ability to trigger hotkey cues instead of just triggering a go for the cue list!).

Option one: Could probably be considered the more professional (and I believe the more expensive solution. Purchase a contact-closer to midi translation box such as those offered by MidiSolutions like their footswitch controller (dual or single) or the F8 which has 8 contact closure inputs. Each of these inputs can generate a unique midi output linkable to hotkey cues.

Option two: A little less expensive, a little more flexible, but not quite as professional. Purchase a keyboard encoder such as the I-Pac (http://www.ultimarc.com). These were intended for use in homebrew MAME arcade cabinets to connect momentary pushbuttons as keyboard keypresses understood by the ROM emulator software used to run the arcade games. However, the same can be useful for us to trigger hotkeys linked to keyboard keypresses.

Hope this can be of some use to folks.