Tech Table

After the previous attempt to build a control area for the tech gear I didn't really want to go through the process again... at least not for a while.

I did learn a few things:
- Minimize space taken from seating area
- Make sure those who have a strong say are on-board before starting
- Make construction happen quickly to both minimize service disruption and the potential for input that once again kills the project.

So a few things had changed since the last failed attempt:
1. We had put in a large equipment ask to upgrade our A/V gear.  The main relevant pieces that we got were:

• A Midas M32 digital sound board, a bit bigger than our current board but much improved
• A Roland v1-HD video mixer

2.  I had listened to a class from the 2015 Reach conference from a minister who also ran an A/V support company.  From his talk/discussion I had a couple take aways:

• Many of the frustrations I found doing tech in my church were common in our family of churches.  
• Having a heart to make services excellent and not just 'good enough' is a way to glorify God.  

So after some soul searching I volunteered to get back on tech and run it for a year to try and improve the administrative side of things so it didn't become such a burden.

3.  We had a minister and song leader move away and the new minister was more interested in having a more modern style to our services.  This meant more use of the projector/screen and really necessitated another person being in the back

4.  The Piano was elevated off the floor so it was easier to see if there was a singer at it.

So running gear from the corner still frustrated me.  It was no good for hearing the room and was cramped and uncomfortable. 

I still wanted to use the back middle of the room but it was deemed too 'high value real-estate'.  The area to the back stage left by the sound board was given the go-ahead for moving the tech table.  I did some planning to get a feel for how to design and use the area:

 






So it was clear that to minimize impact on the number of pews the area gave us enough width but not much for depth.  After some debating about weather I wanted people to walk in front of or behind the table it seemed best and safest to have them go around the front which keeps us a bit more isolated from people moving around the table.

I designed the table to be just wide enough for the sound board and 3 24" computer monitors.  With the design done (note above picture is after a revision when construction had begun) I could look at my calendar to determine when I could dedicate a whole week to the project.  I also figured out I could use the truck from the singles camping trip to load up construction materials and drop them off at the church.

So with the dates set I could figure out timing and do some initial work before a Sunday service then get onto the construction after service to give myself as much time as possible.

I built out the platform first being as wide as possible going all the way to the edge of the doorway.  One of our ministers thought it would look better being set in a bit.  I agreed and adjusted the design to use three 22" monitors and modified the platform I had made.  Fortunately I hadn't ordered the monitors yet.

The next part was the fun parts of actually building the table and surrounds.  This part wen't pretty fast taking most of a Saturday and Sunday.

 

Having the Midas and monitors there was helpful to be able to make sure it all fit right.  The trim work took a good number of trips to the hardware store and was rather time consuming.

During that process I also had to disconnect all the A/V gear as the current table was in the way.  This meant I was committed to getting this all done before the next sunday service.  The next steps was to either paint or stain the wood.  I had initially expected to stain it to blend in with the pews.  Some had suggested painting it white to blend in with the walls.  From the stage perspective this kind of made sense but the general consensus I got was to stain it.  I went to Daly's paint to get the supplies.  I also found out that the steps are: condition, stain, and finish coat.  Each step involved a day to dry so it meant 3 days for finishing... and some late nights for my schedule.

I don't recall doing wood conditioning back in high school wood shop but I guess it opens up the wood pores and helps the stain to have a more even look.

I used the matched stain and ended up doing 2 coats to try and get the color darker.  A rather long process but the birch plywood came out looking surprisingly good, I guess the preconditioning really does make a difference.

So finally the main build was finished.  While I am no professional carpenter I am happy with the way it turned out.  The color is close or noticeably different depending on what direction you look at it and what kind of lighting.

The next big step was moving all the wiring over to it.  Dad came over to help with that; rewiring the power is his thing, I mostly worked on the signal wires.  Early in the construction I had cut us some large holes in the floor for the wires to come up through.  As in all things it took us a while to move and route everything over.

But we got it all hooked up and working.  Having 3 full size screens (we previously had 2 screens using the quadview to see the computers second screen).  So we were able to get it all 'finished' in time for Sunday service.

Over the next few weeks we took care of some of the minor details like adding carpeting, adding a custom vertical drawer for various bits.  Dad did some work on power wiring so we had hardwired power switches and GFCI's for the speakers (we had been turning the speakers on with Z-wave previously).  There are still some minor tasks left like me cleaning up and staining the vertical drawer but all in all a much improved tech table that is more functional and even looks better than the old one.

Control Board Area - Attempt 1

So after 7 years of being in our new home we are finally building a proper area to control our audio and video equipment.  For as long as our church has been in Seattle we functioned as a 'gypsy' church never having a permanent home.  We were used to setting up our sound system every sunday and taking it down to put in storage.  As a result all our equipment is of the portable PA style.  Now that we have a legit home it is about time we made it better suite our needs.







Location
First of all the back right corner has been the home of the AV table since we initially setup our PA system.  It gets us out of the way but is really the worst possible spot to control our equipment.  When trying to hear what the speakers are sending out the center is really the ideal spot.  Also when the congregation is standing it is near impossible to see any performers who are on the ground level like someone at the piano or playing the guitar.  As a result we need to elevate ourselves (it really isn't just for a power trip).  The location required removing the back middle pew but will open back up the back corner and the half of the back right pew we removed so no expected change in seating capacity.

Sound Board
So our Makie board is old, after around 20 years of use moving between multiple locations it has begin to fail.  One of the sub mixes is out, the sliders are crackly and the audio system seems to have a hum which we are pretty sure is coming from the sound board.  Dan was able to find a used SoundCraft 800B which while a few decades old is a much higher quality board and far more serviceable.  Each channel can be removed for servicing or swapping and the passive electronic components are thru hole which can be replaced much easier than SMD (Surface Mount Technology).  One downside is the size, this board is massive, with 8 more input channels it is close to double the dimensions of our old makie board.  Due to the size our new area had to be designed around the board.

Construction
Design
Being a mechanical engineer I spent a fair amount of time to plan and design our setup.  This was to have an idea as to how it would all fit together, maximize our space, and estimate the cost.  In reality during the actual process of building the design wasn't held to very strictly.

It took multiple days of construction:

Day 1: Platform
I chose to build the platform like a deck (post and beam).  From my experience building the stage I can't assume anything in the building is straight or level.  This turned out to be wize as between the 10' width there was a 0.5" difference in height.

   

Day 2: Sound Board and Device Structure
The next day we started building the support for the sound board and other equipment.

Day 3: Compromises

So building something this large in such a public place is bound to raise some eyebrows (or furrow some brows...)  My idea of an area that allowed decent viewing of the stage performers while seated had to be dropped down from a platform at about 16" to half of that at 8".  Also the extra width at the sides where the step would be was cut back.  This also meant loosing the storage underneath, but a few committee members felt that the area was too large for the space... oh well. 

 

     

... Unfortunately due to the size of the sound board this design has been rejected and it will be completely redesigned to be smaller.

Fellowship Hall Heating System

So for anyone who didn't know our 90 year old building is heated with steam.  Steam has the benefits of holding a large amount of heat.  The drawbacks of the steam system are: a very inefficient and wasteful system, slow heating; especially for radiators with no airflow across them, long initial heat up, very complicated system, difficult maintenance, and expensive repairs if a few crucial parts were to fail.  It has been the desire for quite a while to replace the steam system with something more modern.  This last summer we replace a large part of the steam system with a hydronic air handler heated from a donated small boiler.

The steam heating system was abandoned from the fellowship hall, nursery and side lobby area.  What previously required 11 cast iron radiators now involves about as many floor vents.  What used to take a good hour to heat now starts feeling warm in 15 minutes.

Background
In a common 2 pipe steam system water is heated to boiling temperature or a bit above and by its own pressure is distributed through steel pipes to each radiator in a system.  The steam heats the large chunk of metal and radiates heat to a room.  As the steam cools it becomes liquid again (called condensate) which a steam trap allows to flow past.  It then flows by gravity back to the boiler where it re-heated.

A hydronic heating system on the other hand heats water to a temperature below the boiling point of water and circulates water from the boiler to the air handler and back to the boiler.  The air handler has a radiator that works opposite to how a car radiator works.  The hot radiator has air blown through it which goes through ducts to the floor vents to heat the space.  The air in the room is then sucked back into the air handler and re-heated.  The vast majority of home and businesses used forced air heating as convective heat transfer is much more efficient and faster than radiative heat transfer.

Installation
The process of installing the new heating system involved a few main steps which were worked on through the entire summer of 2014.

1.  Install the new tankless water boiler:

- We were fortunate enough to get a small boiler donated to us over craigslist.  These typically cost a couple grand so this was very helpful for our bottom line.  They are similar to tank-less water heaters but instead of low flow and a high temperature gradient they use high flow low temperature gradient.
- The boiler was plumbed with a primary/secondary loop also heating the baptistery (through a water-water heat ex-changer), with two fittings for a future heating loop.

2.  Install air handler, ducting, vents, air intake, and return air handler:
- This was the most challenging physically as it meant crawling around under the fellowship hall to hang the air handler, route the ducting, install the registers, route and attach the water pipes.  Definitely involved some blood and sweat.

3. Removal of old system.
- Certainly the most rewarding.  After the system was up and running we could cut and cap off the steam and condensate lines, remove the radiators, and their boxes.  We kept the traps and valves and the metal radiators were taken by a metal recycler.

4.  Finishing touches
- Once the system was working in time for the winter heating season we could take a break and work on the various odd tasks like: painting the walls, repairing the carpet, painting the air return, roofing the air intake box.

A few months into 2015 the water pump on the air handler went out.  We were able to temporarily glue the impeller on until we replaced the pump.  We installed a new pump in the boiler room and left the old pump in the air handler (with the guts removed).

Benefits
So replacing this heating system cost us about $6,000 with an expected payback of 3 years.  The heating cost for the whole year should be about half the cost prior to the new system.  Since the Fellowship hall is used more than the sanctuary it allows the old steam system to be used much less frequently which both saves energy/cost and limits the need for maintenance on the steam system.  It also potentially gives the steam system hope to last a bit longer.

Future
While we would still like to get rid of the old steam system the payback on that would be much longer than 3 years.  With a cost of $10-20K and minimal cost savings this will need to wait a while.  The current plan is to convert the current steam boiler to hot water and re-plumb most of the building to work with hot water.

Organ

History
Some may remember that our church came with its very own built in organ.   While it was functional; the building was broken into years before we bought it the thieves took many of the small pipes as well as almost all the chimes from the basement organ room.   Later when we decided to abandon the organ we cut the cables from the console so we could move it out of the way for our extended stage.

The Professionals Survey
Early on Dan White had our organ reviewed by a professional organ company to see what it would take to get it up to snuff.  The report showed 228 pipes missing, and 21 chimes.  This was almost half of the pipes in the basement.  There were also 450 pipes in the attic chamber that were not touched.  Organ pipes typically come in sets called 'ranks' but them thieves took parts of 5-6 ranks which means trying to get parts of ranks or replacing them completely.

The cost to get new pipes would be around $15,000, then a new solid state signalling system would cost $20k (since we cut the organ free).  Add in labor and we were looking at maybe $50K on the low end...  Then there is this quote from the organ company I found funny/sad

"But, there are further considerations. As a former Balcom and Vaughan employee who helped to care for this organ - I can tell you that it is probably both the strangest and worst organ installation in Seattle if not the state. Why they chose to place pipes in the attic and the basement is beyond me. And while the Great, Choir, and Pedal will remain mostly in-tune with one another...the Swell in the attic is almost never in tune with the other three divisions. And this is simply because the pipe organ is a VERY temperature-dependent instrument. It will only be in tune at the temperature at which it was tuned. The Swell in the attic is always hotter than the Great/Choir/Pedal in the summer. But even in winter, the Swell heaters keep it warmer than the basement chamber heaters."

Removal

So we gave up on the organ and it sat for quite some time taking up space.  Trying to sell the organ wasn't going to get us much if anything so it is really a matter of finding someone to take it off our hands.  I tried contacting the group that reviewed our organ but I didn't hear back.

For some reason I got tired of it and listed the relay panels on craigslist thinking someone may want to build a relay computer:  http://www.nablaman.com/relay/  I didn't get any computer geeks trying to live in the past but did get someone asking about the pipes.  He also found Puget Sound Pipe Organs and invited one of their members to come and take a look at the unit.  Don't know why I hadn't found the group before but they were a non-profit doing organ restorations.  Both the craigslist person and the organ group were interested in taking the organ away for different reasons, so I was then coordinating its entire removal.  After a few days of them coming the entire organ was gone with the exception of the large wooden pipes we would keep to use for their lumbar (one is 17' long!).

So now we have a decent room to store stuff... and it is already stuffed to the brim.

Future Organ?
The president of the Organ group agreed that the organ installation was very poorly designed (the worst in the Pacific NW!).  Both in having pipes in two places and their location requiring the sound to go up and forward from the basement, or forward and down from the ceiling.  He proposed if we ever wanted a new organ we could have a proper one installed in the sanctuary with pipes on the front side walls, behind the lattice work at the back of the stage and finally in the rear of the room.  Since his group is a non-profit and most labor is from volunteers so the cost would be mostly for the equipment.  A rough estimate of $30-40k would bring a proper organ back.  He also mentioned that his experience showed increased attendance after installing an organ.  As a retired doctor; organs definitely seem to be his calling.  While an organ would be a nice thing to have it will be a while before this could move very high on our priorities for building projects.

Sanctuary Projector

A Little History
Our beautiful sanctuary was designed for speaking... and not much else, things are very different today.  For a few years after we got the place we used a common portable projector and set it on a board on top of the pews to project onto one of the side walls.  This was a crude setup with low quality results and a major pain to setup for the random 3 minute video used during a church service or midweek.

Due to the challenge and low quality of this setup we opted for a more permanent setup.  The solution was to mount a projector from the back and put a screen in the center above the stage.  Having a screen up there all the time would be a bit of an eyesore so we opted for an electrically operated roll up screen.  The screen we got was a 150" 4:3 screen, was about 63 feet from the projector giving a throw ratio of 6.3 feet per 1 foot of screen width.  This throw ratio is large for a common projector.

Fortunately (kind of) I found a used projector and special long throw lens on ebay in Febuary of 2012.  Enter Epson PowerLite 8300i with ELPLL04 lens it cost us a total of $917 which seemed like a really good deal at the time.  The projector worked decently while 'new', however, we found that during bright days the screen would be washed out and barely visible.  2 years after installing, the image was barely visible unless completely dark in the room.  A new lamp didn't seem to do much so we had to accept it was time to kick it to the curb...

Optics, Calculations, and shopping
Before asking for some serious cash for a new projector I decided to spend some time doing research on projectors.  Some important considerations whenever bying projectors:
- Brightness: In lumens of output at the projector
- Candlepower/lux: light measured at the screen (what we ultimately care about)
- Lens F-stop: An optics measurement, an increase of 1 results an a power of 2 decrease in output

This time I really wanted to know what kind of light to expect at the screen.  Dad got a lux meter back when we worked on sanctuary lighting so this allowed measurement of light at the screen and room light.

The Old
To measure the 'current' setup I turned the projector on and measured the light at the screen at 80-85lux or about 8 footcandles.  I calculated the expected light at the screen (5200 lumens reduced to 2977lumens from the long throw lens).  Then using the actually measured light at the screen suggested 700lumens (not the supposed 2977 lumens)!  My best guess is the LCD panels were worn out.

The New
After quite a bit of research I came up with three options: new projector in back, new projector mounted on the ceiling, or add blinds to the windows.  I ruled out the blinds as they wouldn't reduce all room light, were expensive, would stick out from the wall, and operate slowly.

I was leaning towards keeping the current position for simplicity of installation and maintenance but this required an expensive long throw lens and was kind of ugly.  While looking into an optional video over ethernet option I got interested in mounting from the ceiling which was something I had considered the first time around...

After much research into projectors which included figuring out how to adjust for the light reduction due to lens f-stop I settled on a Panasonic PT-EX510U which has a rated lumen output of 5300 which reduces to 4821 when adjusting the lens.  It had all the necessary features including motorized lens shift, zoom, and focus.  Motorized controls were required since I can't physically adjust it.

Ceiling Mount

With such a high ceiling using a ladder from below to mount the projector wasn't an option.  So after measuring carefully with a laser level I found that mounting it to the front facing wall of the attic organ room was the correct spot.  It is mounted with a winch and has 3 redundant safeties that would all need to fail at the same time for it to fall on some poor soul.

HDMI/HDBaseT/Signal Hades
The main challenge other than actually mounting the projector on the ceiling is to get the video signal to it.  Enter HDBaseT which is a protocol to transmit HDMI, IR, ethernet and other signals over a single CAT6 cable.  This is a protocol supported by multiple manufacturers and seemed like a good option.  Cable routing went from the back of the sanctuary, under the stage, up to the attic and finally to the attic center where the new projector is mounted from.  A long run of over 100' but within the HDBaseT spec.

Being the digital age I decided to have all signals go over HDMI it is pretty ubiquitous and straightforward to use... or so I thought.  I used an HDMI matrix to allow multiple inputs to be connected to the projector and to be able to preview a mirror of the signal going to the projector at the back.  Now as probably everyone noticed to my dismay the signal was not stable.  My first guess was the HDBaseT was getting interference so I upgraded from HTBastT Lite to the full HDBaseT with a 330feet limit.  I re-seated the ethernet connector checked the cabling, bypassed the HDMI matrix, read about the many woes of working with HDMI, tried different inputs, different software... pretty much anything I could think of.  After multiple months of frustration we found a few changes that seemed to have fixed the problem:
1.  We put the power adapter for the HDBaseT receiver on a power strip with good noise filtering
2.  Updated the video card drivers on the sound board computer and switched the refresh rate

The last one seemed to fix the problem that always seems to happen only with that computer.  While it seems obvious now and i'm sure I tried it before, previous updates mayhave failed.  I also added a couple of HDMI ghosters which keep a signal going to the computer even if the projector is switched to a different device.

So it was quite a long process but our setup has been working well for months now without any issues.  Our new setup works and looks much better than before.

Sanctuary Lighting

The church Sanctuary is certainly a main focal point of the church. It is where sunday worship is held along with many lessons and teaching times.  Lighting is not something many people think about (nor is the sound system) unless something goes wrong that is;)

A little history:
Best we can tell the sanctuary was originally lit only by the chandeleir.   It was pretty common back then as it probably followed even older designs for candles or oil lamps.  The light shines up from the chandeleir and reflects off the ceiling down to the room below (indirect lighting).  At some point probably a couple decades before we got the church CAN lights facing down were added which gave usable light for the congregation.

As with most areas of knowledge these days lighting design can be a life-long profession... but our needs are relatively simple.  We want light for the audience, light for the stage, and the ability to turn down the lights for videos and such.  Some relevant terms to understand are:
- Lumens: light a device emits
- Candlepower: light measured at area used
- Key: principal light that shines on subject
- Fill: secondary light at angle to remove shadows
- Backlight: light that separates subject from background

When we got the building the lighting situation was that we had the chandeleir lights, and the can lights.  As a church we do more than have readings and sermons on stage so we wanted the stage to be lit more directly.  To fix this an electrician added some flood lights to the chandeleir facing directly at the stage.  This was better than nothing but doing some simple reading online about stage lighting shows that you never want to shine light directly towards a subject.  Not only does this blind the person but it created shadows and prevents the person from looking natural.

A full theater often has 100s of lights to focus on different areas with different colors to highlight a variety of aspects of a performance and skin tone.  While there are occasions where we have plays or the like we don't really need a full lighting grid or lighting bar.  The basic two or three point lighting will be adequate for us.  Two point lighting uses a Key and Fill to lighten an area with backlight added for three point lighting.

So our first step was to add a Key and Fill light for the stage.  We did this by adding wiring in the ceiling and pulling lights up from below through a small hole in the ceiling.  Using PAR56 light fixtures (white cases to match the ceiling) we were able to angle the lights at angles towards the stage.  Keeping the lights to the ceiling did limit us a bit as to getting the angle we wanted but we still were much better than the prior setup.   We did notice that with one light fixture on each side we have a somewhat small 'sweet spot' in the center of the stage and singers on the sides are a bit in the shadows.  Our next step will be to double up the key and fill lights to create a wider 'sweet spot'.  We may also add some backlights from where the trim is above and behind the front of the stage.

 

 

For the chandeleir we replaced its lights with CFL bulbs mostly because they are cheaper.  The original bulbs were incadecent which we replaced with halogen.  We switched to the CFL's which weren't as bright as halogens and don't dim... but since the usable light is reflected off the ceiling by the time it gets to the pews it only shows up as 5 footcandles instead of the desired 20.  So at this point the chandeleir primarily just lights up the ceiling and the chandeleir itself being more of an accent light.

Along with adding fixtures we moved and changed the lighting controls.  We had been using the common Z-Wave control interface for turning the lights on and off but it proved to be rather inconsistent.  We decided to switch to DMX which is very commonly used by DJ light setups as well as large theaters and such.  While we could have bought special DMX light dimmers Tony opted to do a more DIY approach modifying common light dimmers and using an arduino to take the lighting commands to control the dimmers and relays.  With this custom setup  he was able to move all the dimmers from the hallway behind the stage that looked like this:

And replaced it with a custom set of push buttons here:

All the dimmers were moved to the bottom of the stairs above one of the circuit breaker panels to be later hidden inside a nice box.

This is much more out of view.  Also the low voltage control (arduino and relays) is inside the old organ room.

This is also where to go to turn the chandeleir on manually if the control setup is bugs out.  The new setup has worked much better and allows for much easier future expansion and modification.  We can control the lights from the sound board now with a common DMX controller (Obey 10).

With the exception of one of the bulbs blowing out pre-maturely (and taking its dimmer with it) the system has worked great.  Much more reliable and professional than the old Z-Wave...

Thanks to Mike and Tony for making this improvement (especially Tony;)