Pixel Driving Software
Posted by JEC on September 22nd, 2009
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…