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Osresearch/LEDscape. LEDscape. Are you building a giant LED display for your hackerspace or Burning Man and need a way to control multiple kilometers of LED strips? Are you tired of running massive USB hubs of Teensys for each row? Then you might be interested in my LEDscape code for the BeagleBone Black to drive up to 500 meters of WS2811 RGB LED strips at 30fps. On the Teensy 3, Paul’s OctoWS2811 makes very clever use of three DMA engines to generate the bit-train for the WS2811 LED strips, but only supports up to eight strips. Beth’s FadeCandy improves on Paul’s work and has a great frame rate with beautiful interpolation (and a custom USB protocol to pump pixels fast enough to keep up with the frame rate), but the temporal dithering and expanded colorspace features run into frame rate and memory limitations at strips beyond 64 pixels.

The drawback to the BeagleBone is that the 3.3V signals won’t travel very far for large scale displays. DMX. DMX512 (Digital Multiplex with 512 pieces of information) is a standard for digital communication between lighting controllers, dimmers, scrollers, scanners, and other stage equipment. The electronic foundation for DMX512 is differential signaling over RS-485.

Arduino as master device (Sending DMX) Hardware To send DMX data as a differential signal, use a transceiver like the MAX485 or 75176 (a cheaper version of the Max485). Software DmxSimple DmxSimple is a library from Tinker.it! (to use DmxSimple with arduino 1.0 have a look here: MIDI to DMX Software and hardware setup: Control DMX Devices with MIDI Note commands ArtNet (DMX over UDP) karistouf's library implements the ArtNet protocol for both sending and receiving DMX messages via UDP packets. chris's library also implements receiving DMX, working with EtherCard (i.e. the ENC28J60). Sending and receiving DMX without assembler programming Sending and receiving DMX RDM. 1616 – 16 x 16 RGB LED Matrix | RGB-123. New 1M Black PCB WS2811 Digital RGB LED Strip Light 144 Pixel LEDs 5050 RGB SMD WS2811 IC WS2812B IC Water Flash Color DC5V-in LED Strips from Lights & Lighting on Aliexpress.

Scanlime/fadecandy. Fadecandy: Easier, tastier, and more creative LED art : scanlime. Fadecandy: Easier, tastier, and more creative LED art Posted by Micah on Friday, November 1, 2013 · 4 Comments I’ve been working on a project lately that I’m really eager to share with the world: A kit of hardware and software parts to make LED art projects easier to build and better-looking, so sculptors and makers and multimedia artists can concentrate on building beautiful things instead of reinventing the wheel. I call it Fadecandy. Fadecandy isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s an easy way to get started and an advanced tool for professionals. It’s a collection of simple parts that work well together: Firmware that uses unique dithering and color correction algorithms to raise the bar for quality while getting out of the way of your creativity.Open source hardware for connecting cheap and popular WS2811 based LEDs to a laptop, desktop, or Raspberry Pi over USB.The Fadecandy server software, which communicates with one Fadecandy board or dozens.

Fadecandy is battle-tested. Example.