This post is meant to answer some of the questions I’ve received in the ‘comments’ section, as well as through private email exchanges. Specifically, “Great! I now have $X hundred pixels. How do I control them all?”
Having a background in theatre / live production / staging, I lean towards tools written by and for those people.
There are many choices for controlling large arrays of RGB nodes. A nicely written tutorial on the subject is here.
A google search for ‘pixel mapping software’ will return many options. Price ranges from free to many thousands of dollars, depending on the number of outputs required. Software options include Colour-Tramp by Artistic License, Chamsys MagiQ PC (free, multiplatform!), RadLite/PixelRange, Green Hippo’s Hippotozer software, and many more. Also interesting is Landy Bible’s .Matrix program – sort of a poor man’s Catalyst server – which speaks Art-Net and is free from his site.
There’s also possibilities of building custom patches using MAX/MSP. Finally, the fine folks over at kineme.org have done some neat work using Quartz Composer under Mac OS X, plus plugins for USB-DMX dongles and Art-Net.
Note that our (coming soon!) Art-Net interface will work with all of these commercial programs…