For the past year and a half we’ve been lucky to have been lent a Leprecon LP-X24 lighting control console. This has been a really nice board, but now we’re needing to give it back to it’s owners who have another use for it. As we move forward with expanding into some intelligent lights in the coming year, I don’t really want to spend a ton of money on a new controller which could easily cost $3,500-$10,000. So, I’m exploring some options of replacing the controller on the extreme cheap.

So, we currently have 24 microplex channels and 5 DMX channels, all of which are non-intelligent lights (not moving or color changing). Adam Callender at Granger Community Church posted a while back about how they started into a High End Hog controller system by simply purchasing something like a HOG 3PC DMX Widget and controlling their lights using a spare computer running the HOG 3PC Software. This option appears to cost about $1200 $1,700 plus the cost of a computer. And presuming we went with a real HOG lighting console in the future, the DMX Widget would continue to be part of that.

But, then that got me to thinking, “Haven’t I seen some other cheap or free software for lighting controllers?”

Well, after a bit more searching online, it appears that we could purchase a lower end (no pun intended) USB DMX Interface for $151. This would let us drive a DMX universe using software like the following:

• MagicQ (windows, mac, or linux)
• StageConsole (windows)
• miniStageConsole (windows or mac)
• QLC (linux)

Below are two web sites that I found with some more details on cheap/free DMX control:

• http://www.chromakinetics.com/DMX/
• http://www.opendmx.net/

So… I’m looking for any input or experience with any of these cheap/free DMX options. At this entry price point, I’m just tempted to give several of them a try and see if they meet our needs. But, I’d love to get feedback from others who may have already gone down this path.

Being the frugal geek that I am, I’m trying to rethink if there is a free way to replace this system instead of spending another $250 on a new keypad. I’m thinking there should be some way to setup some service so that our nursery workers could call a special phone number and type in the number. Then this number is communicated to the tech booth operators via SMS, IM, or Twitter.

The closest I’ve come up with so far is to setup a special Jott account and link that in with a Twitter account. The nursery worker calls Jott, says they want to contact Twitter, and then speaks the number and name of the parent. This would require the tech booth to be running a Twitter client to see the alerts. Here’s a sample of what I’ve got it doing so far:

I’m thinking there should still be an even easier way to do this, hopefully involving fewer internet services. This solution wouldn’t work if our phone service, internet service, Jott, or Twitter experienced any outages. And, it’s not totally straight forward for our volunteers to use.

Anyone have a simpler idea?

Could a parent send an SMS message to the church as they’re arriving to somehow speed up or simplify the process? When they show up at the check-in area, the volunteers or whatever could have preprinted name tags and labels for the kid.

Then that same cell phone could be used as a contact method for the parent in an emergency. If a parent needs to be contacted, why not send a text message to the parent’s cell phone that they registered the child with?

It’d take some work to make it easy, but why not consider it? Doesn’t most everyone carry a cell phone anyway?

What do you think?

Mass SMS text messaging seems useful for last minute announcements. One thing that pops up every couple of years is the need to cancel a church event due to winter weather. It’d be cool to have an easy way to SMS everyone we have a cell phone number for with this sort of announcement.

SMS alerts shouldn’t be that hard. Here’s what I think we need to do:
1) We should be able to export all cell phone numbers from our ChMS system.
2) Then we can remove all characters from the cell phone data that isn’t numeric.
3) Append ‘@teleflip.com’ to each cell phone number to get an email address for each number. (Any other email to SMS gateway service could work instead of teleflip.com.)
4) Then load the list of SMS email addresses into a mailing list.

I already have some other mailing lists that I auto populate from our ChMS, so this should be relatively straight forward. This could be scripted to update the mailing list every week.

So, if an urgent church wide announcement needed to be communicated, someone could simply email the sms mailing list and most everyone should be notified in near real-time.

Does your church make any similar use of SMS for any communciation?

What kind of plans do you have in place for urgent communications like this?

For a couple of years I’ve been thinking there has to be some way to have dynamically created animations to use as song backgrounds. Several months ago I came across some Quartz Composer animations that were controlled via sound. But, I hadn’t been able to figure out how to use any of these animations in real time with our presentation software.

So, finally last week I decided I was going to experiment with using some sound triggered Quartz Composer animations for song backgrounds. After a few hours I finally setup a video camera to capture my Mac’s screen animation and feed the video into our presentation software via a live firewire feed. It was clunky and awkward to control, but it worked and looked nice. Unfortunately, I only really found one useful Quartz Composer animation to use, Soundstream. So, I’m not ready to put it into regular use, but I proved it was worth exploring some more.

So, has anyone else used any music visualization or VJ software to create song backgrounds? Any advice you can share?

Church Marketing Lab
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cfcc/

Seems like a great concept.

Worship Sets:

LifeChurch.tv South OKC:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=216314816
LifeChurch.tv Tulsa:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=256184053
Mars Hill Music:
http://rss.marshillchurch.org/mhcmusic

Video Podcasts:

LifeChurch.tv:
http://www.lifechurch.tv/rss/messagecast-itunes.xml
Don’t Waste Your Life:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DWYL
Mosaic:
http://mosaic.org/podcast/videofeed/
Mars Hill:
http://rss.marshillchurch.org/mhcsermonvideo

I’ve been seeing a lot of news articles about the new Godcasting phenomenon (e.g. 1, 2, 3, & 4). While it’s not really that terribly new, people are slowly catching on to this cool new resource.

So, in light of the old profiles where you’d tell what is currently playing in your CD changer, I figured I’d tell you my current, favorite podcasts.

God Tech
God in Tech
Blogging Church
Mayberry Driven Church

Sermons/Messages
Grace Community Church
Seacoast Church
Ginghamsburg Church
Mosaic
Daybreak Church

Techie
Security Now
MacBreak (video)
Wired News Podcast
CNET News.com Daily News
This WEEK in TECH
NPR: Technology

Other
CNN News Update
NPR: 7AM ET News Summary
RevTim