Joker Tricks

Design a lighting rig, then find out whether it actually works. Joker Tricks is a rig planner for the person who has to make the numbers add up. You build the rig, and it works out the power, the patch, the colour and the coverage from what you put in. BUILD THE RIG Set your stage dimensions and trim height, then add hanging positions: 48 mm pipe, 200 or 300 mm truss, floor bases and booms, each with its own length, trim, hang points and capacity. Hang fixtures from a catalogue of fifteen types — LED washes, moving heads, profiles, tungsten lanterns, blinders, strobes and pixel bars — each with its real power draw, power factor, emitters, beam and field angles, output and weight. Mark up the stage areas you care about, give each a target light level, and aim fixtures at them. Attach a photo of the venue. POWER THAT HOLDS Put fixtures on circuits and set the breaker, the phase, the cable length and the conductor size. You get the connected load, the current it draws at the fixtures' own power factors, and how much breaker is left under the 80 percent continuous rule. Voltage drop is plotted along the run against the 3 and 5 percent limits, with the end-of-run voltage and the smallest cable that brings it back inside. Tungsten gets a cold-start warning with its inrush current. Across the rig: current per phase, how far out of balance the legs are, and the neutral current. A PATCH THAT FITS Every fixture mode carries its real channel footprint and map. Address by hand, or pack the rig into 512-channel universes automatically — largest footprints first, or in bar order so addresses climb the way the rig does. Locked addresses stay put. Overlaps are shown as the exact channels driven twice, with the next free block one tap away. An occupancy map shows every channel in a universe: used, free or clashing. COLOUR YOU CAN TRUST Set a master level and a level per emitter — red, green, blue, warm and cool white, amber, lime, cyan, UV — mixed the way light actually adds. Each stage area returns a blended swatch, its position on the CIE diagram, its colour temperature and how far off neutral it sits, so a white that reads green or magenta shows up before the room does. Dimmed tungsten shifts warm, exactly as a filament does. Ask for a target colour and you get the brightest exact match a fixture can make — or how far out of reach it is, and which way it misses. LIGHT ON THE STAGE Throw distance, aim angle, beam and field diameter where the light lands, and the illuminance each fixture puts on each area — measured on the plane you choose, the floor or face height. Partial hits are derated by how much of the area the beam covers, so a narrow lens over a wide stage reads honestly. Areas are scored against their own targets, and evenness across the rig. WEIGHT THAT STAYS UP Load on a bar is resolved as a beam on two hang points: the reaction at each against its rating, the total against capacity, and how far off centre the mass sits. Outboard fixtures that would lift the far end are called out. Floor bases and booms are checked for tipping instead, against the base's weight and width. ONE SHEET TO TAKE WITH YOU It all composes into one rig sheet — the stage plan drawn to scale with bars, fixtures and areas, the power and patch summaries, the light per area, and the venue photo. One tap saves it to your photos. EVERY NUMBER COMES WITH ITS REASON Nothing is a bare figure. A circuit that is over tells you which cable run is costing the volts; a dark area, which fixtures sit too low to fix it; a colour that misses, which side of the fixture's range it fell off. Good, warning and critical are marked by shape and word as well as colour. Joker Tricks plans and documents your rig; the addresses, angles and levels go with you to the desk. Work in 230 V / 50 Hz or 120 V / 60 Hz, size conductors in AWG or square millimetres, and load the bundled example rig to see it all working before building your own.