Selection Grid in Eos
This one is for all the MA3 fans or, specifically, a friend of mine who is an MA programmer but really missed Selection Grid when using Eos.
Essentially this is a simple tool that runs on your Mac and connects to an ETC Eos based lighting console (or ETCnomad) on your network and provides an interface for rapidly creating groups based on a fixtures position in 2D space and following similar (but not identical I believe!) conventions to the MA Selection Grid logic.
In an ideal world this would be completely unncessary and similar functionality will appear in Eos magic sheets in the future (hint, hint ETC)
There's very little in the way of documentation, and the easiest way to learn how this works is just to use it.
Essentially, click edit and create some fixtures and arrange them in the grid to represent how they are on your stage (this should be really self-explanatory). There's some nice tools to make it easy to assign numbers in a similar way to what you're used to in Magic Sheets.
You can explore the canvas with the usual gestures such as pinch to zoom, scrolling etc. and can be as big or as small as you need. You can save them too if you reuse the same layout often.
Once you've defined your layout, selection works based on modifier keys and the start and end point of the selection. Again, this is easiest to demo by doing, but ultimately;
Dragging a normal box will select channels in the order shown horizontally, then vertically, starting from the corner the selection started from.
Holding SHIFT behaves similarly, but will select channels vertically first.
Holding OPTION selects channels in columns as they appear in the grid and as they are selected (left to right or right to left)
Holding COMMAND selects channels in rows as they appear in the grid and as they are selected (top to bottom or bottom to top)
Holding CONTROL selects channels in diagonals (this isn't shown in the animation below as I added it in response to a request after I made the animation!)
An animation shows the selection order, to create this as a group in Eos select Rec. Group or hit Cmd+G and enter the desired group number, the group will be created in Eos ready for use with effects
You can download the app here (macOS Apple Silicon only, 5Mb)
If you find it useful, let me know.
A word on "AI Slop" ...
This is a bit of pet project, and was heavily assisted by AI. Note, I stop short of saying it's not AI-generated code per se. To explain why, the origin of this is actually a NodeJS script that presented an interface in a browser. However, that's not a very efficient or user friendly way of sharing an application with anyone other than someone else who likes hacking their own solutions.
Users want to double click on an app and it to appear. Not open a terminal window, install some dependencies via npm, start a command line script and then find a browser and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:24601 or something like that.
Therefore, I decided to use this as a bit of a yard-stick for me in AI development (and the first time I've used it this extensively), I tasked the AI with porting my existing code base, and making some UI tweaks. The logic in this app was written by a human (me), the user interface was defined by the human (with it's origins in loads of SVG <g> elements) but heavily refined by the AI.
So, is this a "vibe-coded app" or not? Well, I don't know now. I didn't say to the AI "build me this" and then open the end result (or, worse, try selling it to people at $9.99/mo) but, conversely, I probably only manually wrote about 5-10% of the lines of code in the end result. I can honestly say I probably only reviewed about 30-40% of it.
Anyway, the end result is that it's a tool anyone can use and you might find it useful, so here it is. With, as is common with anything I make available freely, no warranty whatsoever.