Hi Bryan, I just spoke with Jerry about 30 minutes ago and he asked me to get a little more detailed with you regarding a project we are working on for a customer. The customer has a skull and 3 pneumatic hangmen controlled by 3 separate solenoids and air cylinders. They would like the 3 hangmen to activate randomly and not in unison with a timer. What is entailed?
Phoenix
Random isn't something that the current version of exorcist is capable of, however, you can mix up the loop so it looks random...ish
do you want to control each hangman prop separately whilst the routine is running or are all three part of the same routine?
The first thing you would need is something like a kit74 parallel port card that can connect your computer and activate the solenoid valves.
You could of course go more sophisticated and use a DMX solenoid valve trigger... alas the only one I know of is the one Ive built myself for my own purposes.... or even a parallax board with PWM relays (battle switches)
Next you will need to make a VSA routine that activates your solenoid valves in a sequence, you could make a long sequence with variable pauses between the activations.
finally you could program exorcist with a bunch of timers that would mix up the triggering times and maybe reset times, by multi layering timers you can get something that looks chaotic (ie random) yet only you know that below it all is actually a real sequence.
Maybe a random trigger function is something to add to the feature list for next year.
