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

[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.