![]() If you don't want to order 3 copies (which is the OSHpark minimum, you could also drop me a line and see if I have some.ġ Teensy USB board - I've used the 3.2, in theory the cheaper LC should also work - the pinout is compatible. I designed a PCB - you can get it fabbed through OSHpark with this link. I prefer to use PCB's because they're more robust, easier to gig with, put in an installation, etc. You can make this circuit pretty quickly and easily on a breadboard. Any light from any vendor that says DMX and has an XLR jack should work! It's pretty easy to find a powerful RGB par style light for around $80.ġ PCB or breadboard. Or you can use off the shelf DMX lights like this, this, or even lights with motor controlled heads (you can control all the movement parameters with this board as well). You'll also need a power supply if you go that route. Not counting some sort of enclosure, and some sort of lights to control - the total project cost is about $40.įor lights - you can build your own using LED strips and DMX relays. These instructions will provide everything you need to build this simple, inexpensive, rock solid, and super fast usb midi and hardware midi DMX controller. I designed a PCB to make the circuit easy to build, and have assembled quite a number of them with students in my interactivity courses at Portland Community College. A single modest computer handled all of the sensor readings, DMX processing, animation design, and sound generation and processing. In this example a teensy is not only sending out DMX to all of those LED strips, but another one is reading 9 ultrasonic rangefinders for motion detection. I've been using this solution professionally quite a bit. ![]() Midi is my preferred control protocol for most things - because such a huge variety of software can send and receive. (Mapping CC numbers directly to DMX channel numbers). I then programmed the Teensy to be a USB midi device, and to translate midi cc's into DMX channel values. Also your DMX framerate suffers due to varies computer and USB bus performance issues.īeing a huge fan of the Teensy microcontroller boards - I reached out to the designer, Paul Stoffregen, who kindly shared some simple, fast and reliable DMX code that runs well on the Teensy. If your computer is processing audio (from Pure Data or Max for instance) - you end up with pretty severe audio dropouts. There is a fundamental design flaw: it relies on your computer to send DMX frames. It suffers from choppy framerates and frequent drop outs, and on top of that, all the units I tried became unresponsive fairly often in a variety of software applications. The uDMX project is the only well documented open source option out there, but in my experience - it's not that good. Some of them work intermittently, some work only on windows, and some work only with specific (unexciting) DMX control software. (Although these days a lot of them are copied from the uDMX project). There are a lot of cheap DMX controllers with little or no documentation. There are a lot of expensive DMX controllers with proprietary drivers. It turns out that it's pretty hard to find a good, well supported, inexpensive DMX controller. Tasteful light shows for live techno sets are easy with this. This unlocks cheap DJ lights, turning them into flexible and expressive tools/instruments. It's great for sequencing lights for live music performances, doing algorithmic light programming, mapping sound analysis, data from the internet, or sensor data to any number of low cost lights. It also allows for easy interfacing with programming environments like Pure Data, MaxMSP, Processing and other languages. This is an easy (and inexpensive / ~$40) way to get total control over a wide variety of lights - using existing music software (ableton live, logic, bitwig, garage band, pro tools etc). This project was developed to facilitate curriculum at Portland Community College for the Music and Sonic Arts department. Most content in a more terse form is on GITHUB: Control DJ lights and LEDs from any software or hardware that can transmit MIDI
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