This lighting desk was built in 1996 (before PIC's) It is mainly CMOS 4000 series with some DAC's and EPROM's for encoding. Some was left on vero board and some on PCB's. A total of 780 IC's. It controls 256 lighting channels and has 256 scene memories as well as 16 sub groups of 8 pages (128 pre sets total). it is still running performances (well, until covid, that is). it took 10 months from start to finish, including the mechanics and metalwork. I have however added a couple of PIC micro's now. one for the riggers remote control and the othe to encode and send two seperate DMX outputs. the main output is a system of time coded analog that I devised myself. Tho module shown is just the sub fader / chser module.
In 1996 a stage lighting desk cost upward of £ 15,000. My build cost less than £ 1000. Second: there was no desk available at the time that had the functions I required. Third: No CPU means no software and that means no crashes in the middle of a show. So the goal was to have a lighting desk that had everything I needed and would be reliable. I have just that.
A lovely project. Looks and feels like an old-school mixing console I was used to back when I started with audio gear in 2000s.