POWER!Shot Operating Manual

Copyright (C) 1999 by Pyro Safety

The Software

This section describes the new operating software for POWER!Shot called POWEROS 2.0b (July 1999)

This is a beta release, 2.0b, and while Pyro Safety has done everything we can to make sure that it will function as described herein, it must be recognized that beta-releases are not fully debugged and may show unusual behaviors in unusual circumstances.

Install the Program

POWEROS is provided either as a program on a disk or as an attachment through electronic mail, or you can get it via FTP. (POWEROS 2.0, July 1999)

The program is not compacted or protected, and so it is a simple matter of creating a directory and copying the program and other files into the subdirectory (this includes a few script examples and a help file).

Program Design

POWEROS 2.0 is designed to be a small and efficient firing program to run the POWER!SHOT Computer based firing system. It is not designed to be a scripting program, although it does have some script checkers built in.

The way to think about POWER!SHOT is that you design and make your script using a different program, and then use POWER!SHOT to do some final checks and to fire the script.

We are writing the scripting program, but it will not be available until 2000. However, if you wish us to write a conversion routine that will translate other people's scripts into POWER!SHOT scripts, please feel free to contact us. We see nothing wrong in using their software and our hardware, especially since our hardware is just as good and so much more affordable. It's like buying one make of computer software, a CPU from a second company, and a printer from a third company.

Program commands

Once you run POWEROS you will get a screen that includes a header, a show clock and an elapsed timer, a place for the script name and a command input section. The bottom half of the screen is a scrolling region, and is used to display various information.

The commands can be input in either upper or lower case. They are:

A few typical sessions

A few common series of commands when firing a show or checking a script are:

Example 1 -- Shooting a timed show:

Example 2 -- Checking a script and creating a cue map: Example 3 -- Shooting a manually fired show:

What to do during a pickle interrupt

When a pickle interrupt occurs the program may load some cues, but it freezes before it fires any loaded cues. This then gives you time to fix any problems before restarting.

Afer an interrupt the program asks for a time to restart the show. This time is defined by the "Show Clock", and is the time elapsed since the start of the show. It is provided in the form HH:MM:SS.

Say the show was interrupted at 00:09:30 (for example). Your copy of the script shows that the music has two near-by easy re-entry points - one of them is earlier at 00:09:10 and the other is later at 00:10:10. You can restart at either point. If you start at 00:09:10 then there will be about 20 seconds of dead air because any cues fired before the time of the interrupt will be gone, of course. Starting later (at 00:10:10) would leave a few shots unfired. Future versions of the software will allow those shots to be quickly blended into the rest of the show, or fired manually.

Currently tested environments

POWEROS 2.0 has been tested and found to run on a