Wow, this brings back memories of running the theater in my school. Definitely a different situation, but I like to think we did a good job given what we had.
We didn't really have a budget, just some hand-me-down equipment that came from above sometimes. I and others on my team put together so many hacks to make things work. One memorable time, our light board had broken, but we still needed to run shows.
We didn't have enough time to wait for shipping on a real USB->DMX adapter, nor budget for a new board, so I created a hacked together DMX adapter with a serial to USB adapter and a NAND gate (I put schematics together here, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/magmastonealex/DMXAdapters).
It worked remarkably well for being a bit of a hack, but paired with software like QLC+, had more features than our old light board! It was still in use for controlling special effect lighting when I left, though thankfully not for main lighting and day-to-day use.
We didn't really have a budget, just some hand-me-down equipment that came from above sometimes. I and others on my team put together so many hacks to make things work. One memorable time, our light board had broken, but we still needed to run shows.
We didn't have enough time to wait for shipping on a real USB->DMX adapter, nor budget for a new board, so I created a hacked together DMX adapter with a serial to USB adapter and a NAND gate (I put schematics together here, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/magmastonealex/DMXAdapters).
It worked remarkably well for being a bit of a hack, but paired with software like QLC+, had more features than our old light board! It was still in use for controlling special effect lighting when I left, though thankfully not for main lighting and day-to-day use.