In the description of the PixelPusher Board on this page.... http://www.heroicrobotics.com/order ... it says that it controls 8 strips. So how do you add more?
Thanks
Graham
To add more strips you simply add more controllers. They network together in a self-organizing network that can be extended indefinitely without user intervention- you plug in another controller and it goes. We ran five controllers to run the trees in the video; they use some fairly sophisticated mathematics (a fractal algorithm) to manage synchronization without requiring communication between controllers, so the system can be expanded to any size that you have control bandwidth for. We've run 20 (that would run 160 strips, more than 38000 pixels) on one laptop over gigabit ethernet before, and it worked fine. Though we didn't actually attach strips to those- our lab isn't big enough!
Last edited by heroic; 07-25-2013 at 12:42.
suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
Thanks. How easy is it to do stuff with?
I guess there would be 3 things I'd like to do.
Connect to any movie file / Live cam.
Play coded algorithms (Maths) No idea how I'd do it but ...
Play dynamic algorithms that use either a sound to affect the output or some other variable.
Graham
what you've described sounds like a perfect task for "processing" http://www.processing.org/
which.. just happens to work like a champ with pixel pusher.
suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
The first one (movie files) is dead easy- one of the examples we ship plays videos
The second one (live cam) is also dead easy- we ship a webcam example too.
Coded algorithms are exactly what Processing is designed for. Check out processing.org, we ship a library that plugs into this and makes it easy to drive LEDs. It takes care of all the work of getting data from Processing to the LEDs in realtime. All you have to do is a little cut and paste and any Processing algorithm comes out on the LEDs.
We also ship an ArtNet bridge application that connects ArtNet to our system, and there's also a Syphon client.
I downloaded Processing. My mind is brimming with ideas. Just checking the wallet. I'm depressed again.
seriously tho will have a look at this. Looks wicked.
If our board is too rich for your blood, there's actually a port of our target protocol to the Raspberry Pi. Obviously it's up to you to get it working with whatever LEDs you have, but it plugs straight into our software, which is all open source. (You're welcome to buy our LED strips separately from the controller!)
http://forum.heroicrobotics.com/thre...ds-pixelpusher
Of course, doing this is going to involve a lot of messing around with LEDs- which is precisely what our hardware is designed to avoid. Also, you'll need to figure out some way to feed power to the LEDs, since you can't run them from the Raspberry Pi.