Early on in the semester I was present for a guest lecture William Hales who, after the ever present technical difficulties, presented us with a demonstration of technology currently in use in the theatre sphere. The specific software that he showed us was a software called QLAB which allows for the control of other softwares and hardwares through a standard called DMX 512 which is a software interface format developed as a universal communication standard for all things theatre. Given that Bill is heavily involved with the theatre side of the University of Regina’s Media Arts Performance department, it seems obvious that he should know quite a lot about this background aspect of modern theatre.
This particular software reminds me heavily of another pervasive communication standard that I am well versed in; that’s right, I’m going to talk about 3D printing again. DMX 512 allows for the communication of any command to any piece of hardware that theatre uses. I could see some massive scale productions requiring custom systems but that of course is their own business. Similarly, your average 3D printer uses a communication standard known as G-Code. G-Code is a list of commands that is somewhere around a thousand items long. You have two types of codes, G codes, from which the standard gets its name, which cover movement commands, and M codes which generally alter software or firmware parameters. This standard is open source and also used on a large array of more maker oriented CNC machines as well. It’s thanks to that sort of interoperability that I could use my 3D printer as a CNC mill or even use the same software I use on my computer to control my printer to control a CNC mill that uses G-Code.
I find it interesting that amongst the massive amount of interface standards present in technology today, some things are excellent at being literally everywhere. USB handles everything from cameras to high capacity storage devices. If you need more bandwidth, you can use Thunderbolt which also supports connecting displays, hooking up PCIe expansion devices and the use of hubs that allow you to connect everything you could connect to a normal computer but routed through one connector. G-Code contains every single command that a 3D printer could possibly need and for the ones it doesn’t contain, you can simply add them in on the open source RepRap website. DMX 512 was professionally produced and contains everything needed to control an entire theatre show and the possibility for nearly endless expansion. Ultimately, what these two standards represent is a kind of instruction set and I hope that we do not see what happened to modern CPU’s instruction sets happen to these standards; bloated with legacy instructions that are basically never used anymore and only serve to take up space.
Technically Making Things 