First clip comes from mrpackethead in New Zealand, who used attached 60 1-meter RGB tubes to a section of motorized truss. These tubes are available for hire, by the way.
The track is called “Everybody” by PlanetShakers.. They were actually doing that song, but the audio on my camera was terrible, so I used the original.
It’s downloadable from iTunes, that’s where I got it from.
-mrpackethead
Second clips is a 47.5″ star with 136 RGB nodes attached. Video shot in here in our shop.
For the curious, this is an early prototype of a system which will be distributed by Animated Lighting. Check with them for pricing, availability and more details.
P.S. Video questions: This was shot with a Nikon point & shoot camera, tripod mounted, autofocus off. The camera was perfectly still during recording. But, the captured image hops all over the place. No idea why, and it drives me crazy.
It only seems to occur in high-contrast video clips. Daylight shooting works as expected.
In January we pulled down the light frames from the windows, the balcony and the grand archway. The controllers and cable were all put away, but we left the nodes on the raingutters and upper roofline.
Wednesday morning I pulled out the controllers (last year’s Rev1 Art-Net bridge), extension cables and power supplies. After about an hour of shuffling back and forth, I applied power.
Gratifyingly, the entire rig sparked right up. I was pleased to see that 6 months of outdoor exposure hadn’t affected the nodes in any measurable way.
Question: Can a flock of RGB nodes be ‘played’ in real-time, like a piano?
Answer: See the clip below…
(Note that the sound doesn’t start until half way through.)
Sorry for the rough video quality… The nice camera (EOS 7D + 28-70 f/2.8L) from last fall was a rental, and I’ve not found the courage to buy a set for myself yet.
Nonetheless, I think the gist of the project is nicely conveyed. :)
This clip comes from New Zealand, courtesty mrpackethead & co.
It’s 40 of the RGB Tubes, driven by DMX and some pixel-mapping software they ginned up.
More details, plus information about the release of the strings & controllers, is coming very soon. Thanks, everyone, for your patience through this R&D phase. We’re confident that you’ll be thrilled with the result.
Yesterday I received my sample string from mrpackethead in New Zealand. The factory made us two test strings of 50 nodes each. Hooray for DHL and 2 day (!) around-the-world service. Hooray also for Chinese New Year being over. It seems like most of the country is shut down for 2 weeks in February.
Spent a few hours figuring out the protocol (this new 8 bit controller speaks a somewhat different language than last year’s 5-bit system). Once I could drive the nodes discretely and successfully, I wrote some quick microcontroller code for a DMX bridge.
Here they are, lounging happily in a bowl of tap water. All we need is a fish.
Onward!
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A couple days ago I rented a Canon EOS 7D + 28-70 F/2.8L lens, which I used to capture some footage of the house on a frozen and windy night.
The camera can shoot full-on HD video – 1080p at 30 fps. 5 minutes of footage fills a 4 GB flash card. It’s compressed quite a bit by Youtube, but the actual color rendition is as close as I’ve ever seen. Audio is the same as you’d hear if you visited in person.
This next picture is the physical incarnation of an idea my wife had. She wanted snowflakes on the house. Lots of ‘em.
So we sketched up a family of flakes in the CAD program, then emailed the DXF files to the metal shop that’s just up the road. The shop tightly arrayed the flakes on a 4′ x 10′ piece of aluminum stock, then cut them out on the laser table.
The large flake shown here measures 23″ from tip to top and contains 83 RGB nodes on ~ 1.5″ centers. 83 nodes equals 249 channels of DMX and/or Art-Net. So 2 per universe.
Since we left ‘practical’ behind several months ago, such a massive channel count poses no problem at all.
Snowflake, fully loaded & waiting for installation.
The video clip below shows it running a simple – yet frantic – test pattern. It’s really, really bright.
With any luck, we’ll have a whole flock of these mounted on the house after Christmas. They’ll run through January & hopefully counteract the cold grey winter.
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My wife’s little Nikon point & shoot shot these clips. They’re not spectacular, but they’re at least something. Note that these clips aren’t synchronized to music, they’re just part of a larger cue stack that repeats every 10 minutes or so.
Later this week I’ll be able to post some HD video clips + audio + decent color reproduction.
Yesterday (Saturday) morning UPS delivered the missing link of this year’s light display: a USB dongle, used to authenticate the software which drives the LEDs. The software can be downloaded free of charge. However, communication with the outside world requires an decryption key.
Since then, I’ve installed and tested two Art-Net bridges, which drive about 2/3 of the existing lights. Tomorrow morning, weather pending, I’ll add the third controller and record some decent images.
In the interim, enjoy this grainy, overexposed foreshadowing of things to come:
