Of Castles & Controllers

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Today we decided to head over to Conwy for a mooch about. I used to spend a good deal of my working life with BT in and around the town, but haven't been back there since I retired five years ago. We have recently joined CADW, the Welsh ancient monuments organisation, equivalent to English Heritage, as well as having rejoined The National Trust this year; so a visit to Y Castell Conwy seemed like a good starting point to the day, followed by lunch at the local Dylans restaurant in the town. Pictured is the upper floor of the Chapel Tower in the castle, in whose ground floor still lies buried the remains of an installation I did there back in 1991, with my left arm still in plaster from the fractured wrist I'd incurred on a recent job in a Birmingham nightclub that year [no, I wasn't a bouncer - quite literally...].

The cement screed on the floor of the base of the tower, if excavated, will reveal the ribbon cables I laid to control the display we installed back then. Initially, the control box for it was the one and only UK example of The Brat; an Australian multimedia controller that I imported directly from its manufacturer, after reading about it in a trade magazine earlier in the year. Although well over-specced for the job, it was a good trial run for it and my programming of the device. I remember too, that I had a long - and at the time very expensive - long-distance telephone conversation with its inventor and managing director of the company that manufactured it, late one night from our workshop/office at the museum in Llanberis where we were then based. We got along famously, which led to a rather inflated phone bill that quarter [phone bills were every three months then], but nevertheless I gained some good insight into the design philosophy that went into producing the little beast.

A few months later, I 'hard-coded' the logic of the controller into a bunch of relays and timers, and replaced The Brat, repurposing it for another show in another castle: Criccieth. The last I heard of it or contact I had with it, was when I was phoned out of the blue to reprogram the show, after the system had crashed, some years into its life, by the then 'maintainers' of the display, as I was the only person in the UK who knew how to program the thing and had the original laptop and software with which to do the job. Oh, how did I inwardly smirk when I hit Enter and restarted the show. Schadenfreude can be so sweet when someone's nicked your contract from under you...


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