Backstage at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Working backstage on a big show usually involves turning up for work, testing the lighting system and placing out equipment like lights and effects equipment that can't normally be in public areas during the day. Then if all goes well we sit around and drink tea and repair equipment while the show runs, while being on standby to jump into action if anything major goes wrong during a show.
This particular day was annoyingly eventful due to two different faults on a single network which were shorting the same data line to ground intermittently in a manner that made finding the fault quite tricky. (Intermittent faults are always hard to find.) In this case we decided to add a data buffer mid-span and then divide the lighting on that stream into four sections, and quickly narrowed it down to two faulty sections that we could then narrow down further by monitoring the status lights on the data buffer while deliberately aggravating the problem.
A very strange fault scenario that was quite intriguing to pin down.
One fault was a haze machine with a fault in its CPU card's data section and the other fault was this light which had been badly terminated at some point.
When we had got the problem fixed we brought both pieces of faulty equipment up to our workshop and I diagnosed the hazer as having a faulty RS485 chip and reterminated the DMX connections on the light. The rest of the night was fairly uneventful with the only other task being to monitor the audience areas during a part of the show that uses lasers to ensure that they were operating in their defined areas.

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