Here at Resistor, other people’s technology cast-offs show up on our shelves. Occasionally we take one down and give it a good thrashing to see whether or not it’s useful. This time, we have an animation controller manufactured by the strange little company “Gilderfluke” that specializes in robotics controls for the sort of thing you might see at a kid-themed pizza restaurant. Given that they have an Orlando office, they probably also do business with the big D.
The Gilderfluke device is a heavy I/O, heavy serial process logic controller. It has facilities for time synchronization between devices, and the company sells add ons to facilitate passing audio over long distances without losing sync as well as driving DMX-equipped theatrical devices. It’s clearly overkill for Resistor, but only in the sense that we aren’t planning to build a theme park, because otherwise we *love* overkill. Why use a class 2 laser when you have a perfectly good class 4 available?
This PLC is interesting both because it is a new rabbit hole of neatness, but more importantly because it has lots of LEDs. Although we are in the age of the organic LED display, where rich text and video can be placed on near about anything – the romance of the LED, the sheer eye-candy of monochromatic lighting will continue to delight us for years to come.
Will keep you updated as we dig out the RS422 adapters and start talking to the world inside these things.
