showstack — the technology behind live shows, explained

Everything a show runs on, and why it behaves like that

An open, citable index of live entertainment technology — every protocol, standard, tool and box, with a source on each fact — and 40 animated explainers arranged as one chain, from a vibration in the air to a feeling in a person.

Searches names, ports, vendors, gotchas and 繁體中文 at once. Or browse protocols, standards, software, hardware, glossary.

Understand it Learn Why DMX needs a terminator, what QoS is protecting, why 128 is not half brightness, what may hang over people, and how a feeling gets built. Every diagram moves; most have a dial you can turn. 40 explainers · 7 stages · one chain Look it up The index Protocols with ports and gotchas, standards with access links, software with what it actually speaks, hardware with what is on the back, and a bilingual glossary. A citation on every fact. 556 entries · 246 open gaps Work it out Field tools Subnets, DMX unit loads, bridle geometry, voltage drop, speaker delay, noise dose, RF intermod, frame budget, pyro fire time. The same arithmetic the test suite runs. offline once loaded · no login When it breaks Find the fault Six failures that have taken real shows down, investigated a step at a time. You are answered on the order you look in, because naming it after forty minutes of guessing is not the same as finding it. nothing scored · nothing stored Build on it The API The whole dataset as JSON, no key and no rate limit, plus eight recipes you can paste: an offline port lookup, a console macro, a Companion module, a spreadsheet, a flashcard deck, an AI tool definition. CC BY 4.0 · MIT · no key

And what it is all for Experience architecture You cannot design a feeling, only the conditions and the timing. Attention, arousal and expectation as materials — and why the peak and the ending are the only two moments that survive.

The logic of the whole thing

Most of this knowledge lives in people’s heads and in PDFs nobody can find. It is real, it is checkable, and it is scattered across a dozen trades that rarely read each other’s documentation. showstack puts it in one place, in one order, with a source on it.

The order is the argument. Everything follows one chain — something physical becomes a signal, the signal survives a wire and a network and the air, it becomes something in a room, several systems agree about time and space, and it arrives at a person. Each stage answers the questions the one before it raised.

STAGE 01Foundations6 explainersTransducers, bits, colour, line codes, pinouts STAGE 02The signal6 explainersDMX, show networks, RF, radios, comms STAGE 03The room10 explainersSound, light, drawings, rigging STAGE 04The system3 explainersClocks, tracking, drones, pyro STAGE 05What you build with4 explainersAPIs, code, engines STAGE 06The person7 explainersSenses, perception, neuroscience, emotion, presence STAGE 07Machines that copy us3 explainersVision, AI, robots

Everything is cited: Every fact names its source, and where we could not find one the field is left visibly empty rather than guessed. 246 of those gaps are open right now.
Everything is connected: Every entry links to the explainers that cover its mechanism, and every explainer lists what it just talked about as things you can look up.
Everything is open: Data under CC BY 4.0, code under MIT, a JSON API with no key and no rate limit. Fork it, ship it, build on it.
Bilingual by design: The glossary carries 繁體中文 alongside English, including the regional variants and false friends that cause real confusion on headset.

92protocols 103standards 109software 108hardware 144glossary terms

Built by people who run shows, for people who run shows.

If a field is empty or wrong, the fix is one file and one pull request, and your handle goes on the entry permanently. If it saved you an argument at load-in, that is the whole point.

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