Hi All,
I thought some of you might be interested in the Christmas lights I designed for the front balcony this year.
I fabricated 32 'pixels,' each containing superflux RGB LEDs. The pixels are driven by a DMX-512 signal, which is commonly used in theatres and concert halls to control lighing equipment. It's basically a differential RS-485 protocol which runs at 250 KBaud.
In this particular application, the source of the DMX signal is a video clip which runs at 30 frames per second. I hacked together some software bits which extract color data from an arbitrary video file and send it out the door as a DMX stream.
That's right - the lights can be driven by iTunes visuals! Some of the color fades and washes are majestic to behold.
It was a small batch / trial run sort of project, but I'm very pleased with the way everything turned out.
Photos, video clips, schematics and a fairly detailed write-up of the project are here:
www.response-box.com/lights/B1167474708/
And yes, it's somewhat over-engineered. But it works, and it only took about 30 minutes to write & test the PBP code for the pixels. Each processor contains an 'F628 running at 20 MHz.
Cheers,
John
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