DMX controlled Led strip project

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Ssetr
 
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Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2023 4:36 am

DMX controlled Led strip project

Post by Ssetr »

I’m hoping this is the correct forum for this question and apologies if it’s not.
I am the theatre production manager and resident lighting designer for a youth theatre company based at a high school in Australia. We are planning on using Led strips within our set for an upcoming production but would love some assistance on the best control option. All the lighting for the show is operated via an ETC ion console with 2 available universes of DMX and an additional 4 universes over Ethernet via a DMX king. Each universe of DMX gives us 512 addresses. The two onboard the lighting console will be required for the fixtures within the lighting rig. Leaving the other 2048 addresses available for controlling the LED strip. My question is this. Is there a better way to do it? If I were to send through the plans, lengths of led strip required etc would anyone be willing to offer advice on other ways to do it? The last time I did a production using addressable Led strips was nearly a decade ago a the technology has advanced considerably since then. The students on our production team will be helping with this project but as time is our biggest limiting factor I want to have a clear outline and methodology as a backup should they run into any issues along the way. I also need to make sure I’ve ordered everything we’re going to need asap to ensure it gets to Australia in time!
Thank you in advance for your thoughts and your time :)

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: DMX controlled Led strip project

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

DMX has been the standard for show control for a long time, and will probably continue to be for the long term. You may as well stick with it as your standard.

Functionally, you'll probably find it easiest to control the LED strips with microcontrollers programmed as DMX devices. It will probably be easiest to program them to use a single DMX channel (one 0-255 value) and to have a set of pre-programmed LED output patterns. Then you can use the channel value to select the pattern you want to display at the moment.

You can get fancier if you want to: you could use three channels as RGB values, for instance. The cost of that is in mapping the color channels to your light board.

We don't carry any DMX gear, but Sparkfun has a DMX-to-LED board you could use as a starting point:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/sp ... led-shield

or here's a project that uses one of our Feather boards:

https://bikerglen.com/blog/dmx-featherw ... ontroller/

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Disciple
 
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Re: DMX controlled Led strip project

Post by Disciple »

Hello. I'm another hobbyist chiming in with a caution.
A couple years ago I needed to assemble the same device. An online guide led me to obtain a low cost RS-485 interface and an Arduino library from Conceptinetics. The circuit it produced worked. In fact, it worked really well, but it didn't play nicely with genuine DMX512 instruments in the same chain (flickering). If you encounter that same tutorial, be aware that the LEDs will probably need a DMX line all to themselves. Just my two cents.

Hallelujah!
Disciple

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