Rob has been working in and writing about lighting for more than

25 years, on shows around the world. He wonders if this makes

him a classic... or just old!

classic geari TECH

MARCH 2020 • WWW.LSIONLINE.COM90

C A mark of a really revolutionary product is often that it doesn’t have any existing category to slot itself into. Looking at it now, you’d describe this classic as a pixel

mapper or a simple media server. But when it first appeared back in 1994, those terms hadn’t been invented. So it just went by it’s name: Lamp-Tramp. When people needed it, they found it, because nothing else could do what it did.

It wasn’t created on a whim, but for a project - it was only later it became a product. Pink Floyd’s epic Division Bell tour in 1994 had amongst its many visual elements the Periaktoi, rotating triangular structures along the front of the stage, with one face containing a grid of PAR46 lamps. The request was for a control system that would let it “have hieroglyphics come up, maybe ‘Hey Teacher’”.

One approach would have been graph paper and intricate plotting on a traditional lighting console. But Artistic Licence’s Wayne Howell, who’d been handed the specs for both this and a motion control system for the show’s stage effects, was struck by a different approach: why not just sketch or place images directly onto the grid of lights. Like all great ideas, it sounds so obvious now . . .

Howell created the software to do this himself using Borland TurboC including, in those pre-Windows days, having to create his own graphical interface. Lamp-Tramp lets you lay out your grid of lights, patch them, then either sketch or type text onto them, or import bitmap images created in other software such as Corel Draw, which could then be scaled or positioned onto the grid. With lightbulbs as the output device, imported images were greyscale, the grey levels translated to light levels through an adjustable mapping.

Lamp-Tramp allowed the creation of cues - an image, or a change to the position of scale of an image. Cues were then used to build sequences, and then stacks, providing a way of triggering multiple sequences - the philosophy borrowed from the Avolites consoles, on which Howell had previously worked. For the Pink Floyd show, Lamp-Tramp was triggered via MIDI from the show’s Wholehog.

The limited processing power of the PCs of the day meant Lamp-Tramp needed help to output data: Artistic Licence created a custom ISA-card DMX processor containing an array of PIC microprocessors

working as fast as they could. For Division Bell, that gave one DMX universe; by the time of the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour later that year, two universes were needed to control the array of 900 PAR20 lamps embedded in the set - an early warning of how data-hungry pixel mapping tends to be (and remember, each one of those light bulbs needed a dimmer to drive it).

A few years later, feeling the need to re-write Lamp-Tramp to be Windows-based, Wayne Howell realised the opportunities LEDs would offer for this kind of work, and so Lamp-Tramp added colour to become Colour-Tramp, at the same time incorporating the then-new RDM to help manage big fixture arrays.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Lamp-Tramp should be delightfully-flattered by the fact that pixel-mapping controllers and media servers are now everywhere. Or, as Wayne Howell says of the moment when these other products started appearing and adopting those category names: “I just thought, someone’s given a name to what we’ve been doing for years.” I

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Lamp-Tramp | by Rob Halliday . . .

B Lamp-Tramp at work on the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour