Some projects make sense because they’re likely to be profitable. Other projects justify themselves by making life easier. My DMX project, though, is all about “oooh, pretty lights.” I’ve always enjoyed theatrical lighting, and the couple of years I was involved with lighting and lasers for raves were fantastic. And now, with the advent of affordable LED-based, DMX-controlled lighting fixtures, it’s finally practical to do some cool interior lighting on a hobbyist’s scale.
Since the last time I wrote about the DMX lighting project, I’ve graduated from two small LED par fixtures to six small pars (Chauvet Colorsplash Jr’s), two Colorsplash 196’s, and one Colorsplash 200b. I’d love to get my hands on some more serious outdoor fixtures to really light up the building, but sadly the really bright LED fixtures are still too expensive to justify picking up just for fun.
The software has evolved, too, and is now all fancy, with XML-based configuration and an iPhone web interface that serves as a decent remote control. I’ve got it set up to run any number of zones, each of which can contain any number of fixtures, and zones can either run independent programs or follow each other in various ways (for instance, it looks cool when the spotlights follow the washes by about 2 seconds, and rotated about 30 degrees through RGB space).
LED-based fixtures are really a godsend to hobbyists — this same lighting project would have been doable years ago using traditional fixtures, but the expense involved in constantly replacing bulbs, in addition to higher initial cost, would have made it a very pricey hobby indeed. LED fixtures are cheaper up front — I got my last batch of four Colorsplash Jr’s for $35 each — and will, in all likelihood, last forever.
DMX, on the other hand, is really not an ideal home automation protocol. You’d think that 24 bit color (8 bits each for RGB) would be enough, but either the hardware in all of my lights is limited to less than 8 bits of resolution, or the human eye really can tell the difference between 0×01 and 0×02, especially in reds. On top of that, each fixture has its own means of defining color controls and mapping them to DMX channels, so software abstraction is needed to turn an RGB value into appropriate commands, and then one fixture’s idea of R,G,B=192,192,0 is much different than another’s. All of the fixtures I’m working with are RGB based. For architectural or interior design purposes, this stuff would make a lot more sense as Hue, Saturation, Value (HSV) rather than Red, Green, Blue.
The real answer is for someone to design LED-based interior lights that run on an HSV color model and use something like Zigbee to communicate, so all they’d need was a power cable and perhaps some rudimentary configuration. That’s bound to happen at some point, but for now I’m happy with my homebrew and software intensive solution. Next up: Slimserver integration to set lighting scenes based on what music is playing, and audio input to allow for subtle tweaking of light patterns based on music. Oh, and fog machine control. You’ve gotta have fog, right?
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