focalintent | Relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten

I've been feeling sleepy/exhausted all day today and am pretty much bailing on anything that requires leaving the house. Since i've been house bound, though, I've been able to get further on a little project I'm working on - far enough along that I now have video:

I have a 15 space shelving unit in my office that I want lighting for. Me being me, I don't just want lighting in there, though. I want each shelf space to have it's own, separately controlled rgb led light. Oh, and I want this thing to run patterns based on - well, anything really. Sound, randomness, motion sensing, what have you.

While putting this idea together, it also dawned on me that this could make for some fun lighting for one of our structures for burningman and balls started rolling from there.

The heart of this setup is a dmx/spi 512 decoder board going to 32 rgb led channels. To fill out the dmx part of that, I also have a dmx to spi decoder.

I'm running the decoder board into a pair of 16-port rj-45 patch panels. From the ports on the patch panel, I plan on using plain old cat-5 ethernet cables to go from the controller to the strips of leds, cut from a 16' roll of RGB leds on sticky backing tape.

Currently, I'm using a piece of shit Chauvet Obey 3 (shitty enough to not deserve a link) to drive the dmx board. This is mostly so that I have a way to test my wiring until my usb dmx adapter shows up and I can drive the full system. How shitty is the Obey 3? Just watch the video above to see how "sound reactive" the lighting is :P

At the moment, my intention is to drive it with software written to run on a Sheeva plug at burningman. The base plan is to just have it do pretty color patterns and washes along the dome. The slightly more ambitious plan is to make that sound reactive. The OMG-only-if-i-quit-my-job-and-syzygrid plan is to also make it react to the placement and movement of people in (and outside?) of the dome.

I think I can have the whole thing running in under 50 watts. Less if I decide on a different solution for the controller (the sheeva plug pulls 19 watts). I'm hoping to keep the core pattern software as independent of i/o libraries as possible so I can easily move it around. ("Why not ardiuno?" I hear the maker masses cry out - maybe after burningman, but there's only so much time for learning new things between now and then, and this is a project to fill in the gaps in the in between time)