Spikes

The Spikes feature is designed to mimic the usefulness of real spike tape. Rather than trying to remember bizarre motor position numbers (like 251.13”), you can assign names to commonly used positions (‘on stage’ = 251.13”)

With the release of Spikemark 5 Spikes got even more powerful.

Beyond that original means of describing a position, Dynamic Spikes let you define a calculated value derived from the motor's position at the start of a cue by using two additional properties: factor & offset.

Factor = the basis for a number range that should be considered full motion of the spike

Offset = a distance from the start of the factor

If that sounds too abstract, here's concrete example:

Say I want to move a turntable to "90" to line up some walls on the set. But, I don't want it to go more than 1 revolution to get there, and I always want it to move clockwise. So in the world of absolute encoders, where the reference is always 0 degrees, if the turn table is sitting at 392, it should end up at 450 degrees to be at the nearest "90" position. But math is hard. If the next time I run the cue it's starting from 360, I really don't want to rewrite the cue. Instead, I can set up a Dynamic Spike with a factor of 360 (degrees per rev), and an offset of 90 (how far I want it to go from the last complete revolution).

Pretty cool, right?