DiyLightAnimation
Hardware => Other Projects => Topic started by: marsjoseph on September 03, 2009,
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Im working on a school project at SELU with three other people. We are interested in writing a program for windows that gives the user an easy to use GUI to synchronize their Christmas lights. I know there is currently software out their but we intend to produce a product of our own.
I need some help getting pointed in the right direction because currently I have no idea how I will get my custom program to operate with hardware. My light show will be VERY small scale and I am interested in getting the hardware working in the quickest way possible that will still allow me to integrate my software into it.
Anyone have any pointers or at least a good place to start researching on learning how to get my custom PC software to produce a light show that the hardware can use?!?!?!?
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Greetings,,,
You may be in for a bit of a learning curve. First, you may want to decide what hardware to use. That determines you output requirements for the software. We use DMX here, mostly. You may want to learn a bit about it. Plenty of sites with info on it..
Good luck.
Keith
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What kind of hardware do you have ? DMX ? Grinch? Other?
That's the first thing we need to know if we are to provide any help.
Leo
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Im working on a school project at SELU with three other people. We are interested in writing a program for windows that gives the user an easy to use GUI to synchronize their Christmas lights. I know there is currently software out their but we intend to produce a product of our own.
Can I make a case for *not* doing this? ;) ...
While I understand what you're shooting for -- a fun project to learn more about programming -- the world now has at least two Windows-based applications that do this across a variety of controller platforms (one is commercial, one is free -- not open source, just freely distributed).
What the world doesn't have is the same type of application on another operating system. The freely distributed application -- Vixen -- was developed under .NET and those underpinnings mean that it will never be ported to another OS. You can't run it under WINE or any WINE-like environment on Linux.
There are a number of us who support Windows only because we want to do Christmas lights. I bet we would be willing to help out a college-age crew if it were developed for a Linux or (better yet) Macintosh platform. I can't speak for everybody, but if your professor would be willing to contact me, I'd loan you a controller so that you wouldn't have to build much hardware. We could probably drum up a spare DMX dongle for you as well.
But for another Windows app? I'd be less motivated.
Nonetheless, best o' luck.
\dmc
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I would definitely be interested in a Linux variant. Less so a Mac, but there are probably some common elements that would fit both platforms...
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You could always write it in Java but I can tell you from experience GUI development in Java ain't no fun!