In the near future, I plan on adding another XKey unit at lighting to control Reaper playback to make programming lighting cues to the band’s rehearsal easier. There’s some extra stuff going on like using a switch block to turn off the inactive LEDs whenever a new cue is fired and setting the toggle switch on the side to disable the buttons to protect against accidentally firing a lighting cue when I have an operator at the lighting console. So now each button triggers a MIDI note and each LED is listening for a MIDI note. The ControllerMate workflow for this process I programmed the LEDs on the XKeys for each lighting cue to illuminate when they hear a specific MIDI note on the network. The beauty about ControllerMate is that not only can it send MIDI commands, it can also listen to them. I really wanted both XKeys to stay in sync so that if I fired the “Teaching” cue at FOH the corresponding LED would light on the XKey-8 at ProPresenter and visa-versa. You already know how much I hate having to take extra steps so I ordered a XKey-8 to install at ProPresenter. I got trapped in the Production Suite and hadn’t yet fired the Walk In lighting cue. However, I did notice one flaw in my design. It worked flawlessly! Since I didn’t need all 16 buttons dedicated to firing lighting cues, I decided to allocate some for Reaper to make Virtual Soundcheck easier.įiring lighting cues at the first gathering was a piece of cake. I built mine so that each button would fire a specific MIDI note that the RoadHog would then listen to and in turn, fire a corresponding cue. I downloaded ControllerMate, installed it on our Reaper computer sitting at FOH, connected a XKey-16 and started dropping in building blocks. I needed to be able to smoothly fade from cue to cue and be able to jump around as necessary without any gobo pops or erratic movements. One thing it’s not so great at is controlling our compliment of moving-head fixtures and how they transition from cue to cue. Great question! Our architectural control is great for many things. You may be wondering why I opted out of using our architectural control in favor of the RoadHog. With Xkeys I was able to program it to fire lighting cues on our RoadHog while I was still standing behind the CL5 at FOH. I’m not sure how your church is, but at Sandals we have a difficult time pulling in volunteers who are available weekday mornings. That is, until I was asked to support a weekly gathering on Thursday mornings. I know there are a ton of other things I could do with MIDI, but this is all we needed to. By interconnecting those four devices I am able to automate Reaper, trigger backgrounds on our center screen and run MIDI Time Code for video synchronization and lighting cue firing. By using these I was able to get three of my Mac computers-ProPresenter 1, ProPresenter 2 and Reaper-connected to our RoadHog. Memory Capacity Approximately 1,000 keystrokes or commands in onboard memory.Each pair of these guys are capable of bi-directional MIDI communication over a CAT5 cable.Power Consumption XK-60: No LEDs: 32 mA, Blue LEDs max: 98 mA, Red LEDs max: 145 mA, All LEDs max: 202 mA.Power Source USB port, nominal voltage = 5 vdc.USB type USB 1.1 (compatible through 3.0).Connector Wired USB 2.0 standard “A” plug.Backlighting 1 blue and 1 red addressable LED under each key.Optional Keys 2x1,1x2, 2x2, and 1x1 blocker.relegendable with Cherry MX compatible stem Number of Keys 60 single keys, 1 programming button.Switch Type Full-travel rubber dome, carbon on gold contacts, guaranteed for over 1 million operations.Emulation Modes HID keyboard, HID mouse, HID game controller.Development Kits Windows (C++, C#, VB.NET), Linux (C++), Android (Java), raw HID (any language/OS).Software Windows: MacroWorks 3.1 | Mac: ControllerMate for X-keys Free Software.Operating System Use: Any OS via USB HID | Programming: Windows XP through 8, Mac OS X 10.4 through 10.8 Free Programming.Two color addressable backlighting (red and blue).Free Software Development Kits for programmers.Clear, removable key caps for applying and changing legends. Unique unit ID supports multiple units on the same system. Our SDKs includes examples for C#, C++, and VB.NET with a separate SDK for Linux. Engineering provides Software Development Kits to support all input and output data for the X-keys. The X-keys may also be configured as a standalone USB keyboard with macros programmed in onboard non-volatile memory. Engineering’s Pi3 firmware supports direct communication for the software developer and our new reflector feature sends messages to even the most reluctant software. MacroWorks software for Windows and ControllerMate software for Mac OS X combine ease of programming with a wide and flexible range of options. The X-keys XK-60 and XK-80 feature keys with independent backlighting.
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