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Other Projects / Hardware ideas
« on: January 13, 2009, 01:53:36 pm »
Hi Everyone,
As I mentioned in my intro, I've recently decided to shift my home spun setup to a Lynx compatible / pin compatible design and I'm looking for some hardware projects that I can contribute. Obviously, most of the obvious needs have been met but I'd like to solicit ideas for additional hardware that could make things easier.
My first order of business will be to get a dongle design that uses the Enttec DMX Pro plugin done. This might seem superfluous to some given we already have a dongle but the decoding of the serial stream from the computer and encoding of DMX are fairly important building blocks for doing pretty much everything else.
The next question is what else could we use.
Ideas that come to mind are tester type devices. A powered box that just turns everything on. Broadcasts all 0xFF or all 0x00 on all 512 channels. I definitely found myself wanting one for being able to turn all the lights on or off. Also nice for testing boxes one at a time. Comments? How does everyone else deal with this? A laptop running Vixen?
The next step would be to display the output through an LED matrix and also toggle individual lines. I know that someone has done the 8x8 LED matrix, I built one myself on perfboard and found it pretty useful, but people here didn't really seems to bite at it.
Another interesting problem people seem to encounter is getting the signal from a computer on the inside, to the display on the outside. Wireless which is already being worked obviously would address this. What do people think about just doing an LED/Laser Diode & Photodiode type design to go through a window.
There's a good possibility this could be an all in one device. For instance, having the photodiode on the same board as the LED matrix would actually be useful since we could have the matrix light up with the DMX feed which would help with aiming the LED/Laser Diode.
Are these things that people need and or want?
Ideas don't necessarily have to be broadly applicable. Just interesting enough for me to want to try it and if you're the only person who wants it, you can just have my proto.
-Allen :-)
As I mentioned in my intro, I've recently decided to shift my home spun setup to a Lynx compatible / pin compatible design and I'm looking for some hardware projects that I can contribute. Obviously, most of the obvious needs have been met but I'd like to solicit ideas for additional hardware that could make things easier.
My first order of business will be to get a dongle design that uses the Enttec DMX Pro plugin done. This might seem superfluous to some given we already have a dongle but the decoding of the serial stream from the computer and encoding of DMX are fairly important building blocks for doing pretty much everything else.
The next question is what else could we use.
Ideas that come to mind are tester type devices. A powered box that just turns everything on. Broadcasts all 0xFF or all 0x00 on all 512 channels. I definitely found myself wanting one for being able to turn all the lights on or off. Also nice for testing boxes one at a time. Comments? How does everyone else deal with this? A laptop running Vixen?
The next step would be to display the output through an LED matrix and also toggle individual lines. I know that someone has done the 8x8 LED matrix, I built one myself on perfboard and found it pretty useful, but people here didn't really seems to bite at it.
Another interesting problem people seem to encounter is getting the signal from a computer on the inside, to the display on the outside. Wireless which is already being worked obviously would address this. What do people think about just doing an LED/Laser Diode & Photodiode type design to go through a window.
There's a good possibility this could be an all in one device. For instance, having the photodiode on the same board as the LED matrix would actually be useful since we could have the matrix light up with the DMX feed which would help with aiming the LED/Laser Diode.
Are these things that people need and or want?
Ideas don't necessarily have to be broadly applicable. Just interesting enough for me to want to try it and if you're the only person who wants it, you can just have my proto.
-Allen :-)