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Keyboard control of Countdown timer

Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2017 11:40 am
by iamchrislaurie
I would like to be able to control the countdown with a keyboard key (or external input).

My use case is for triggering the theatre interval. I assign one key to a fade out function for the last active scene and ringing up the house lights. I would like to also start a countdown timer automatically at the same time. Currently I do this via separate mouse-click but sometimes you have pressing to attend to things (like stage managers in your comms) and you have forgotten to start the countdown after bringing up the house lights and then you can't time the interval.

Maybe inputs for start/stop, reset and stop+reset.

Re: Keyboard control of Countdown timer

Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:59 pm
by ISane
I need this too...

Re: Keyboard control of Countdown timer

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:55 am
by Tubby
Hi Chris,

You might be able to achieve what you want by one of these methods:


1) Use the countdown as the button, and program your changes into its schedule.
2) Use a chaser that will bring up the lights and drop them down again in 5 minutes. A chaser by itself wouldn't give you any feedback of how much time is left, but if you put it in a cue list you could see the remaining time, you get pause buttons, and it can be set to keyboard shortcuts.

This is probably crazy and overkill but:
If 1 isn't possible due to your VC setup, you could try getting more complicated. You could use the countdown as the button, and setup the schedule to drive a feedback universe which you setup to press buttons as needed.

Re: Keyboard control of Countdown timer

Posted: Fri May 26, 2017 3:28 pm
by siegmund
I had some time to implement this. You can test if you want on my clock-external-input branch: https://github.com/siegmund42/qlcplus/t ... rnal-input