It took a couple days to organize his kit (dayjob!), but here’s his string of the new 2010 RGB nodes flashing merrily away.

His toolchain is Madrix (running in a virtual Windows machine on a Mac, natch) –> Enttec USB Pro –> DMX / Pixel Bridge I designed –> 50 Nodes.

Video courtesy an EOS 7D SLR.

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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Finally!

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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Thanks!

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.

Hi!

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:

2009 RGB Node Preview from Engineering Solutions Inc on Vimeo.

It’s been a busy couple weeks…

News: we have the beginnings of an Art-Net interface for the new 4-wire nodes from Asia.  For being totally unoptimized, it’s running fairly well.  The Art-Net input code currently barfs if more than a single universe of data is present on the wire, or if a single universe is updated at more than ~ 10 Hz.

However, it’s very satisfying to see the node appear and properly complete the ‘handshake’ process with Artistic License’s ‘DMX Workshop’ software suite.

We now have an official Vendor / Product ID from AL as well.

Next step is to streamline the code, remove the ugly bits, and increase throughput to support 2-4 universes at ~40 Hz refresh.

Onward! Thanks for visiting.

Peter Jones of Mountain View Staging was kind enough to bring a video camera over late last week.  Below are a couple video clips of the point source pixels in action.

Point Source Pixels from John Chapman on Vimeo.

Point Source Pixels – Zoomed In from John Chapman on Vimeo.

What a day!  This morning I drove downtown to get another 200′ of power and data cable.  I’d previously used 400′ of each for the two lower rooflines, the arch and the garden lanterns.

I finished and tested a second 8-way DMX splitter, because the upper and lower runs are assigned to separate universes.  Then, I weathersealed the remaining 100 or so pixels for the three upper runs.  

We started installing at 5:30 and were finished a few hours later.

The test pattern we ran during installation – and which is shown below – toggles between green with red sparkles, red with green sparkles and blue with white sparkles.

All told there are about 200 point source pixels and 19 ‘classic’ pixels mounted in the garden lanterns.

Click a photo once for medium size, then a second time to see in a larger size.

Will post video clips once I’ve found a 3-CCD camera that has decent dynamic range.

Here are some pictures I grabbed halfway through the installation.  

The low parts of the house are done.  The high parts of the house are terrifyingly out of reach.  Will work on those later this week.

There are 100 point source and 19 standard pixels in the garden lanterns installed so far.  That makes 357 channels of DMX-512.

Click a photo one for medium size enlargement, then a second time to see it full size.

Here’s a small (but growing) collection of projects which include our DMX pixels.

mrpackethead from New Zealand sends this photo and video clip.  Pictured are 160 of the ‘classic’ RGB Pixels, based on daisy-chaining cat5 network cable.

If you’ve used pixels in a creative or exciting way, we’d love to hear about it.  Send your pictures, links or video clips.