New Aerotech glo-juggling (etc) equipment

[denny]

Aerotech have announced details of (and started shipping some of) their new range of glow equipment for jugglers, poi and staff spinners, etc.

Shiniest. Things. EVAR.

Details:
http://www.globall.com/?articleID=14828&heading=Ultimate%20Juggling

Video evidence of supreme shininess:
http://www.gandinijuggling.com/films/roncalliclubshi.wmv

I may have to sell someone's kidneys.

Comments

[squiddity.livejournal.com]

No sign of the staffs yet thought.

They are apparently going to be 280 squids!

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

As far as I recall, that would be significantly cheaper than the last ones - are you sure about that price? The new juggling clubs are 250 each...

[squiddity.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think so, Stu-monkey knows and will probably comment to that effect here shortly.

[megashrike.livejournal.com]

makes me actually want to finishing learning poi

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

You never finish learning :)

[megashrike.livejournal.com]

True, but I still only know the *very* basics. Ran out of sunny weather before learning properly, going to have another go this summer :)

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

I see they haven't improved the programming interface, and the whole thing of having to have them all plugged into a laptop on stage to have them synced for a proper routine...

:-(

Aerotech have excelled themselves in producing a half-arsed product. I'd perhaps feel more charitable if they didn't still have my devilstick having refused to fix it, even though it never properly worked. I'd also be more charitable if the aerotech display (read "Freehand Juggling") at 2 conventions last year hadn't had a club die on stage.

I can't express my disappointment with Aerotech enough. I know that they're expensive to cover their R&D costs, and I understand that they don't make that much of a profit, but they've never had a useful warranty on their products, and their recommendation for any performer was to buy two or three of anything that you need one of, which is patently ridiculous. So I've now lost all sympathy for them.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. When two of my pro globalls died horribly (the rubber casing split due to the batteries overheating on charge), more than a year after they were purchased, they replaced them for me for postage cost only - fairly quickly too, as I recall.

I was also impressed when I found out that any profits they make that don't go into product R&D, go into R&D on renewable energy sources. As far as I could work out from the info in their leaflets (admittedly not very detailed), they're paying their wages, designing new toys, and then funneling the rest of the money into trying to save the planet.

As for plugging them into a laptop on stage, I don't understand what you mean? It looks to me like you program your routine in advance, synced to music generally, and load it via USB (all done in the comfort of your frontroom presumably). Then when you just fire the routine off with a tap when you're ready to start. Why do you need a laptop on stage?

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

A year is not really an appropriate warranty for a juggling club that costs 250 pounds, or a devilstick that cost 280 pounds, especially knowing their reputation.

If you have globalls or gloclubs, they're pretty good at replacing them, because they make those in sufficient numbers to be useful.

Because you can't reliably tap all the props at once, if you want to properly sync it to the music, and potentially to the other visiuals, the only way to do this is to have them all plugged in, start everything together, and then unplug them. A show I saw at a European, where they'd made a custom version of this type of thing before Aerotech introduced the "Ultimate" range did it with radio syncing, which is far more useful.

The programming interface is absolutely shockingly dire. They say "it's a text file" - this is true, there are 4 commands (single letter, I think), each taking a single numeric argument. One sets the Red level, one the green and one the blue. The fourth command sleeps until the next colour setting for a specified time. I'm not sure if it allows comments, I'm fairly sure it doesn't allow looping, though I could be wrong. I hate to say it, but for 250 pounds a club, a finished interface that doesn't make me feel like I'm entering things in in binary (no, I'd even prefer an assembler here) would really be good.

I'm just disappointed in general, and disillusioned with their service. There was a point, about 6 months after I got my devilstick where they'd had it for more time than I had, and that was counting the time I'd had it as the time where it hadn't worked and I hadn't yet got around to posting it back to them. It went back at least 5 times, and then they refused to fix it because they'd stopped making the sticks due to reliability issues, and didn't have the tooling anymore.