LED Timer?

[Natepelzel]

Hey guys, I'm looking for one of of those big LED countdown timer clock thingies. (super technical terminology I know). We want to use it on the back wall to give whoever is on stage an idea of how much time is left for their particular section o the service. Ive found a few that would work, but all the ones I've found are controlled via an IR remote. Which won't work for us since we are in a different room than the clock itself will be. Do you know of any controlled with a computer? Or even better, a seperate console? I can't seem to find any. Maybe I just don't know the right words to google?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Nate

[Esoteric]

Projector?

[Natepelzel]

Well we do have a projector on the rear wall, and I've spent some time looking for software that would do large sized countdowns, but haven't found any that would suffice. any suggestions? I'm on a Mac, btw. Also, our rear projection only mirrors the front two projectors. It seems that the hardware required to project a seperate image on the rear projector would cost more than a dedicated clock.

If your question was for clarification rather than suggestion, then no, I'm not looking for a projector. I'm looking for something like this:
http://www.magnumclock.com/?sa=X&ei=...ed=0CGQQgwgwAA

[Paris MkVI]

If you can route the web or a PC to the rear screen, online-stopwatch.com will give you count-ups and count-downs. THey also have an executable file for Windows machines you can run from the desktop.

We use that for events with small group breakouts and break times. For services, we use Big Clock (freeware) and simply push that to the rear screen during the sermon.

[tdangelo]

In the broadcast world count down timer displays for talent or the control room staff, or timecode time-of-day displays (which would be count-up) are often made by Leitch (now owned by Harris Corp).

For Example: http://www.broadcast.harris.com/prod.../DTD-A19B2.asp

These (if used as a count-down) often have a wired remote panel for someone in the control room to reset, start, stop the display as needed.

http://www.broadcast.harris.com/prod...rs/UDC-RCU.asp

You may be able to find older Leitch models on eBay etc that work fine.

In the corporate or political A/V worlds there is D'San

http://www.dsan.com/SpeakTimers/Limitimer1.asp
http://www.dsan.com/SpeakTimers/TimePrompt1.asp

which offer a red/yellow/green traffic light type display for presenters and/or a numeric display. These are great for company or town counsel type meetings where people are alloted a specific amount of time to speak, and/or where you want to give the presenter a warning light that they running out of time and then a red light that they are out of time.

[daver2]

We have adopted a similar traffic light LED system at our church. We bought a cheap mains 6 Volt "wall wart" power supply to save messing about with high voltage stuff and wired a switch in series with a low-value resistor at the A/V desk and a long length of wire to a high-brightness LED display mounted just above our camera. Three switches, three resistors and three high-brightness LEDs (red, yellow and green) provide the necessary indications.

We start off with all of the LEDs ON (as a "lamp test" function and also an indication to the service leader that the A/V team is not ready). We then switch to GREEN when the A/V team is ready to hand over to the leader. As things progress we switch the YELLOW LED on when it is time to wrap-up that section of the service and then switch the RED LED on when it is definitely time to get off and hand over to the next section!

This has worked for us very well and is dead cheap to install.

If you wanted to go down the "clock" route - one option to think about may be one of these scrolling message boards hooked up to a computer. They can normally be driven by a serial port - but would require someone with simple programming experience to write the software necessary on the computer to drive the display. You can then use the display for other things other than a dedicated count up/down clock.

Dave

[Esoteric]

I was just thinking of using PP (or some other software with a video countdown that you could use) and either using the second output from PP or another dedicated computer to project the huge clock. I know when we do our installations/training we teach to put just black or white text on the prompter on a separate feed from the video/graphic feed up front.

That is the easiest/cheapest solution in my mind (and the one my church uses). Since you already have the projector, just run a dedicated video line from a spare computer running PP and put a contdown clock on it and make it as big as you want for next to nothing cost wise.