Our newest machine, Curtain Call, got a nice write-up in this month’s issue of Lighting and Sound America. Here’s a screen cap of the page (click to view larger):

You can read the whole issue of Lighting and Sound America by registering on there website here, and clicking on the Digital Edition link at the top right.

We’re running an ad in the April issue of Lighting and Sound America, which should be coming out at the end of this week. Here’s our ad- keep an eye out for it!

After purchasing many of the fabulous Mega-Couplers from The Light Source for our various products, we decided to become a distributor for them. As of today, we will be stocking and selling 3 styles of the Mega-Coupler. You can find out more on our website by clicking here.

Thanks to Light Source for bringing us into the family!

This holiday season and throughout the new year, the staff at Creative Conners wishes you peace and joy.

Word of mouth has always been our strongest marketing, and today we announce a new program to reward all of our friends who help spread the word of Creative Conners. Our Referral Rewards program is simple- If you tell someone about how awesome the CCI products are and they buy more than $4000 in gear, we will issue a $250 credit to both of you.

So make sure you tell your friends how much you like your CCI gear. Now there’s something in it for you. Check out all the details here, and thanks for getting the word out!

Today we stepped outside our comfort zone. We hosted a video shoot here at the shop.

For a while now we have been looking for a better way to describe the Creative Conners system to people who are either new to CCI or new to automation in general. We have tried diagrams and experimented with interactive web sites, but we found that the best way was to just describe it, usually over the phone.  But that system requires people to call and ask. So we decided to make a video, starring yours truly that covers what components make up the system, how they tie together and how Spikemark works. In 4 minutes or less.

So we wrote a script, found a videographer, gathered some gear, cleaned up the shop a bit and shot video for 3 hours. We’ll edit it down next week and we’ll let you all know when it’s live. We think it’s going to be great and we can’t wait to get it out there.

It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been fun. Building automation is what we do and we love it. But as Gareth likes to point out, sometimes life gets a lot more interesting when you’re doing new things.

Last week we finished up an order for Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida. Part of that order was a refit of an SMI winch from 1992 that they wanted to use with the Creative Conners control system, so they sent it to us for some updating. The original plan was to add a brake and an encoder, put on the cable plugs to fit with our Stagehands and send it back. By the time we added up the costs, we realized we could simply replace the existing DC motor and gearbox with a brand new SEW Eurodrive gearmotor with integrated encoder and brake for not a whole lot more.

Asolo Rep ended up with a quiter machine. The new motor is AC, which runs quieter than the DC, and the brake on that gearmotor is almost silent. In addition, since Asolo Rep was also buying a second Stagehand and winch, both Stagehands could be AC, so they can be interchanged.

The moral of this story is that there’s still life in those old machines. If you’ve got a winch that isn’t up to spec, don’t throw it out- for about half the price of a new winch you can have a machine that works like it’s brand new! If you want to find out what it takes to update your equipment, let me know at ian@creativeconners.com and we’ll put a quote together for you.

Last weekend, Gareth travelled to Indiana to present a seminar to the Technical Theatre students at Purdue University. Besides the basics of automating scenery, they discussed electrical, software and circuit board design which appealed to this group who have a strong overlap with the Purdue Engineering department. They dove deep into the design of the Stagehand OEM, the heart of our system, covering both the initial design decisions and the specific chips & circuits employed. It was a great talk, and Gareth got a chance to hang out with the next generation of leaders in the industry.

Gareth was excited to report that the Purdue students were enthusiastic and engaged and really got interested in the logic planning of software design, which always gets Gareth really excited, so it must have been pretty exciting in there!

Quick thanks to Rich Dionne for Inviting us to West Lafayette. It’s always good to get out of the shop and work in-person with the great people we interact with every day.

Three years ago we introduced The Revolver, our friction drive machine for turntables, and ever since it has been one of our most popular products. Over the years, we have noticed a tendency for the encoder ‘dancer’ wheel to rise and drop as it it tracks along the edge of certain turntables, causing the encoder to lose counts. The original mount was a machined block of HDPE that slid inside P1000 Unistrut and was tensioned with a spring. Unistrut has enough variance that insuring a precision fit to our machined HDPE shuttle was error-prone and time-consuming. If the turntable and encoder wheel weren’t perfectly parallel, the slop in the fit between the shuttle and the Unistrut would lead to inaccurate positioning. So we put our new Product Engineer, Royal Marty on the case. He designed, fabricated, installed and tested a slick new mount (seen here) that guarantees that the wheel will track true, resulting in more accurate encoder counts and more reliable positioning.

This is a great example of critical evaluation and constant improvement. We keep polishing products like the Revolver to make them fantastic.

One of the great things (according to us) about the Creative Conners gear is that we’ve spent years honing the product line into reliable “stock” items. By building modular components rather than custom systems, we streamline our operation and give our customers more bang for their buck. This was the goal from the beginning, and it works pretty well.

Of course, some projects require something a little more special than our stock products. In the past, we rarely tackled custom projects because we didn’t have the space & additional people-power to give custom jobs enough love and attention. But now we have a new shop and new people, so we can dig into some of the fun custom projects while continuing to run the core operation. This week we began production on 2 custom jobs for Mystic Scenic Studios. They are both traveling exhibits with interactive displays, the first is for the NY Hall of Science and the other for Ecotarium. They both have tiny linear actuators, some buttons, a dash of AV, and an undeniable need for electronic control.

These are small, fun jobs that give us a chance to explore different technologies and do some creative problem-solving. With more people around to help keep the regular production line moving, Gareth has time to put on his Mad Scientist hat and create some cool stuff. He’s ordering custom circuit boards and doing some programming with Basic Stamps, Arduino’s, and maybe a little embedded Linux. Of course, being Gareth, he’s trying to standardize the circuit board design and make it into a stock item for use in generic exhibits. We’re excited to have the resources to do these things. Solving problems is what we love to do and it’s fun to flex our creative muscle.