The desk arrives tomorrow.
The patch goes out tonight.

Families covered

Five device families, plus a free category for whatever no entry covers yet:

• Audio — 8
• Lighting — 3

As soon as a project mixes two families or more, tabs appear above the canvas to isolate one at a time — lighting alone, audio alone — recomputed from the same diagram, never stored separately.

What you won’t find on the first night

Nine moves that don’t show themselves at first glance, but do most of the time-saving once you’ve found them.

Cable list and CSV export

The documents panel recomputes the cable list on every change: one label per cable, its source, its destination, its length. The Export menu’s “CSV cable list” gets it out in one click, ready for a spreadsheet or the workshop printer.

Start from an equipment list you already have

A list kept in a spreadsheet imports as CSV: one line per device, with its quantity, brand and model. Columns are recognised by their heading — quantity, brand, model, description, in English as in French — with no need to rearrange the file. Models found in the library arrive with their sockets, ready to cable; the rest are placed anyway, to be filled in. The button is on the empty canvas, and in the “Import” menu.

The cable label, and the Content field

Every cable carries a computed label (A01, A02…) that can be pinned by hand if it needs to survive a revision. Next to it, the “Content” field — a free line, something like “Mix 3 — drummer wedge” — doesn’t count toward the numbering: it answers “where do my mixes go?” without knowing the label by heart, and shows up on the line, in the side panel, in both CSVs and in the field viewer’s search.

Pulling a bundle

From a cable already run, the inspector offers to repeat the link N times onto the next free ports of both devices, in the order of their back panel — the move behind a hand-drawn “8 streams” arrow, but eight real cables on eight real ports, each on its own line of the list and the patch, in a single history entry. A bundle stops at the last free port and says so.

The zone frames

On the canvas, a frame per location (“Stage”, “FOH”…) groups the devices placed there, and a toolbar button shows or hides them. The frames print on the sheet, so a plateau with several places reads at a glance on paper as on screen. Each device takes its place from the Zones tab, and the patch sheet and the cable list carry it.

The ×N device

A lighting plot doesn’t draw eighteen fixtures one by one: a “Quantity” field on the device shows “× 18”, and when the device has an input and an output of the same signal (DMX IN and THRU, say), the copies chain themselves through a generated jumper — the cable list counts the jumpers, the equipment list counts the units, the diagram stays one block.

DMX addressing and the patch sheet

Two fields are entered on a device that receives DMX: its starting address and its channel footprint. The universe itself is never entered — it’s traced back up the cable from the source that sends it. The DMX patch sheet and its CSV export follow, ordered by universe then address; a device with only one of the two fields filled in is flagged rather than silently missing from the sheet.

The device library

729 entries covering consoles, speakers, fixtures, cameras, SDI and ST 2110 capture cards, networking and installation gear (Extron, Crestron, Q-SYS, Biamp, BrightSign, meeting-room audio and video), reviewed in batches one by one against the manufacturer’s documentation; an entry not yet reviewed carries an orange dot in the interface. A device missing from the catalog is created in two minutes, ports included, and then kept under “My devices.”

Stage vocabulary

The words Technipatch keeps as-is, instead of translating them into software jargon.

FOH / control

The position from which sound or lighting is run during the show.

Front of house

The main PA, aimed at the audience.

Patch

The correspondence between an input or output and whatever it’s wired to.

Breakout

A multicore cable that splits into individual connectors at one end, often through a DB25 breakout.

Tap

A second feed taken off an output that’s already in use — flagged, not forbidden.

Jumper

The short cable that chains two identical devices sitting side by side.

Stage box

The collection point for stage inputs, linked to FOH by a digital connection.

P17

The industrial connector for three-phase power feeders on a stage.

Keyboard shortcuts

The moves that come up a hundred times per plan. “Ctrl / ⌘” means whichever command key your system uses.

The other guides

• Cable list
• Stage plot and patch sheet
• DMX addressing
• Audio over IP
• Power distribution
• Export and print formats
• The three axes
• Public examples

What Technipatch refuses to do

Said plainly, a deliberate limit is a reason to trust the product, not a confession of weakness: it says where the product stops and why, instead of letting everyone discover it in production.

Left out on purpose: a full quoting/ERP suite, 3D and architectural CAD, an AI that would “draw everything from a text prompt”, a million-part generic catalog, and the exotic export formats reserved for integration suites.

Free-floating arrows

An official festival video system diagram, handed over as a PowerPoint deck, makes the case on its own: eighteen connectors with only one actually attached to a shape, “8 streams” arrows that are nothing but drawings, nothing that counts anything. Technipatch refuses to reproduce that move — a free line attached to no port would make a worse PowerPoint than PowerPoint, and it would break the one invariant that makes the product what it is: a line is a cable, so it gets listed, numbered and checked.

Every need those arrows served has a modelled answer earlier on this page: cable content for “where do my mixes go”, the zone frames for the overview, and bundling for the big “8 streams” arrow — eight real cables, on eight real ports.