The screen for the hours before a show, while cameras are being hung and cable is being run. It answers one question continuously: what is ready, what is not, and what is actually wrong.
Twenty-four expected, by number and position. A tool that only lists what it discovered cannot tell you that camera 19 is missing — and on a rig day that is the only question worth asking.
The roster remembers serials, and a camera reports its serial the moment it is reachable. So a camera hung anywhere, on any node, in any order, lands on its own number without anyone touching the screen. Rigging does not have to happen one camera at a time.
A new unit, a borrowed one, a replacement mid-show: it appears in the tray with its serial, Show me puts its picture up so it can be told apart from the others, and Install drops it onto a number. From then on it is remembered and finds that place by itself.
Four dark cameras behind one node is one fault. Laid out by number they look like four broken cameras and somebody spends an hour on the wrong end of the cable.
Not on the network, no control, no picture, two lenses of four. The step that failed says where to go — power, cable, or the camera itself.
A round trip on its own means nothing, especially over Wi-Fi. Measured against the router in the same check, the difference belongs to the camera's own run of cable.
Ping, ARP and the streams already arriving are free and are what this screen runs on. A control connection is not: the camera has one session and does not take it back on its own, so it is opened once per camera and held, never reopened in a loop.
Press it before touching a camera. Nothing is sent to that one while the mark is on — no control, no start, no polling — so a unit being recabled is not fighting the desk. It stops counting as a fault and starts counting as work in progress; clear it and the check runs again from the top.
Cameras are hung over hours. The screen updates itself and keeps the history, so a camera that came up and dropped out again is visible as exactly that.
Not ready — 7 to go. The number that decides whether the show can start belongs at the top, not assembled in someone's head from a grid.