Stage Controller
Run a full lighting rig live from an iPad.
Most lighting consoles are built for someone sitting still at front-of-house. I needed the opposite — something I could hold while walking a room, watching a crowd, feeling where the energy wanted to go next.
Stage Controller is a touch surface for ENTTEC's ELM. It speaks the same OSC and DMX that the big desks do, but the interface is mine: oversized cue buttons, a master fader you can find without looking, and a layout that reshapes itself for whatever rig I happen to be running that night. I designed it on an iPad because that is the device that survives a load-in — no mouse, no menus, just glass you can drive with a thumb.
The hard part was latency and trust. A lighting cue that lands a beat late reads as a mistake to everyone in the room, so the whole stack is tuned to feel instantaneous, and every control gives physical-feeling feedback the moment you touch it. If the app ever feels uncertain, the operator does too.
It started as a tool for my own gigs and quietly became the way I run live light. The next version adds timeline-based cue stacks so a whole show can ride on muscle memory.
