Author Topic: DMX Status Panel  (Read 23894 times)

Offline petefats

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DMX Status Panel
« on: July 06, 2008, »
One of the things I really liked about my 595 was the status leds on each channel.  Not only useful for simple troubleshooting, they also made it have a sort of 'looking into the matrix' feel.  I could look down at the board in the garage and know what portion of the sequence was playing.

I'm not sure if this is possible, but I think it would be neat if you could somehow marry the DMX frontend common to the Lynx family, with some PWM drivers, like LedTriks.  Basically a board that would sit just past the USB->DMX device working as a 2way splitter (like the 4 channel one currently available).  One leg goes out to all the devices, the other uses a start channel of 1, and has 512 leds.  I don't think the leds would be able to support the full range of 256 for the dim value.  I would imagine the pic would have to reduce the resolution to something a little more manageable, since the led's are already in a matrix.  I think even 8 or 16 levels of dim would be enough to make something like this usable.

Way past my current knowledge to design, but whatcha guys think?


Offline blickensderfer

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2008, »
I think this would be a good feature.

Dan

Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #2 on: July 07, 2008, »
Interesting idea.  It's a lot of LEDs but using 8x8 matrix blocks, that's only 8 of them.  The trick is driving the leds; there are a number of pwm driver chips that do 16 at a time, but that would be too many.  What about a micro that does the scanning of the matrix along with the pwm - one per block?  I'd have to look at the numbers to see if it will be fast enough.

Offline snething

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #3 on: July 07, 2008, »
How about using 4 freestyle boards and drive the leds instead of the ssr.  Use the new splitter and your LED status display would be one leg and you could use the other three for your display.

Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2008, »
OK, I just ordered some led matrices and will play.  Sounds like a fun project.

Offline tconley

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #5 on: July 07, 2008, »
How about using 1 8 by 8 matrix and 2 push buttons to control what page to the channels it displays.  You could even put an led number to list the page number currently being display.   That should minimize the number of drivers needed but still allow you to look at every channel.  I even drew up a very rough idea of it.
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Offline petefats

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #6 on: July 07, 2008, »
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How about using 4 freestyle boards and drive the leds instead of the ssr.  Use the new splitter and your LED status display would be one leg and you could use the other three for your display.

half of me wants to consider this.  half of me still has blisters from pressing in what felt like 1 billion top mount rj45's as i assembled my freestyle this weekend.  the freestyle works great, but i gotta imagine that its overkill to run ebay x1000 leds one by one.

the other half of me just keeps saying, 'remember those two books you bought a month ago?  go read them.'   prolly should just listen to the other half :)

Offline Aussiephil

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #7 on: July 08, 2008, »
I wonder - or maybe i'm raining on ideas - my apologies in advance.

If you create something that can display all those channels (512) on LED's - haven't you just made a 512 channel LED Controller.................................

I like the concept of the 8x8 matrix
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Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #8 on: July 08, 2008, »
Yes, at least for low-current LEDs.  For now, I will do a 256 channel display (16x16); that should keep the refresh rate reasonable.  A jumper would let it know which half of the universe it is listening to.

Futurlec has the displays for $1.80 each. 


Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #9 on: July 26, 2008, »
I got the displays and have started to lay out a board for a 256-channel display.  The only question I have is what processor speed I need to handle both the DMX reception at 25K bytes per second, the display scanning, and pwm dimming.  At a 20MHz clock, the DMX itself only allows 800 instructions between characters and the x16  scanning with 8-bit brightness allows 4880 instructions between ticks.  Without writing the code yet, it seems tight but doable.

/mike

Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #10 on: August 01, 2008, »
I guess I will spend some time this weekend writing code.  I just finished loading the boards.




/mike
« Last Edit: December 29, 2009, by n1ist »

Offline christmas_in_VA

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #11 on: August 01, 2008, »
wow! That ougt to be interesting.

Ben
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Offline Greg

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #12 on: August 01, 2008, »
Hmm, very interesting.  Was thinking about doing similar but using my laptop as the display device. DMX/USB receiver, little bit of code on the PC... and viola portable diagnostic tool. Oh wait, thats what you're doing even more portable. Battery operated?

Greg
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Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #13 on: August 11, 2008, »
I hate it when work gets in the way of blinky flashy...  I now have the display scanning code running (32 levels per pixel; above that I start getting flicker).  Now to add the DMX reception code.

The schematic and PCB files (ExpressPCB) can be found at
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Note: I have made an updated version (with real Gerbers, so you can use a real PCB house)  and will post them shortly.
/mike
« Last Edit: December 29, 2009, by n1ist »

Offline n1ist

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Re: DMX Status Panel
« Reply #14 on: September 18, 2008, »
I finally got back to working on this.  It's working now, with 64 levels of intensity.  I have tested it with a Enttec USB PRO under my dimmerboard software and under Vixen.  I still need to check out the support for the second half of the universe (right now, I'm only testing one panel set to channels 1-255).

/mike