tonight's video is accompanied by non-such brewing's baltic porter
the tasting notes in the can suggest that it is a smooth coffee and chocolate notes
this non-such brewing does some pretty good beers and the name itself is a reference
to local history i've talked about that before and i'll put a link down in the
description because i think it's a really interesting thing where they got the name from
so as you can see i have been doing some tinkering and experimenting and working on
a project which as you can also see is somewhat unfinished well okay completely unfinished
but it sort of works not the way i intended it to and it's not in its final form yet but
here we go um i just figured since i said this thing has been taking me just like spare time
in my evenings which i haven't had much of just like an hour here an hour there for probably three
weeks to a month and the fun part has been you know soldering this all up and getting it working
for me personally the less fun part has been bashing my head against the software
and the whatnot i know a lot of guys that are coming to arduino are coming to it from a software
first standpoint they understand software they can write code and the hardware is a new thing for me
it's exactly the opposite i've been doing hardware since forever i mean professionally for 35 years
tinkering with hardware but i haven't really done coding at all since high school and that was
you know that was commodore pet basic um and until i bought an arduino starter kit a few years
ago i literally hadn't touched code so this is a basically a starting from scratch for me and the
good thing about the arduino platform is all the libraries um and the example code that comes with
them that lets you get up to speed with things pretty quickly and once you get fairly quickly to
the point where you can have a project that mostly does what you want you know so this uh in case you
uh don't recognize it or don't remember it is a dmx 512 controlled cheapest available on ebay
stage light it communicates as i said with using the dmx 512 protocol
which is a professional lighting protocol and in a previous mail bag i got this sort of usb
adapter um this one being a cheap crappy one doesn't use the standard connector the
standard connector is a five pin xlr this this one and a lot of other cheap ones use a three pin
whatever that that aside um it does the job uh it speaks the protocol which is the important thing
and it uh it lets me tinker with this so what i have been working towards is just like a small
lighting console essentially i've got six linear faders here that i got in a mailbag uh
month or so ago hiding down in here is a little max 485 chip which is a rs485 line driver
it is taking its control from this arduino nano over here the six pots are going into six of
the eight available analog inputs over here um the other two analog inputs are doubling
as i squared c which is controlling this lcd display yeah liquid crystal display display
and other things that i have soldered together on here i've got a rotary encoder which
is not doing what i want it to do it's a software problem it is supposed to
in my in my head i wanted it to select what channel these pots are starting at
okay back up a little bit dmx 512 has as name would suggest 512 channels of control
this light here uses eight of them um i've only got six pots on here because that's how many
analog inputs i have available but basically one controls each the brightness of each of the colors
red green blue and white this one is a master just dims the whole thing at once
this one is a chasing mode or a flash strobing mode flashing mode and you adjust the it adjusts
the speed of that flashing the other two on this light are sound control uh or fade auto fade and
channel eight would be the speed control for channel seven on the light and on every light
you can tell it what its starting address is so of those eight channels we're starting channel
one is actually channel one if i was to set this thing to start at channel 10 then the
first channel of it will be 10 the second one will be 11 the third one will be 12 and so on
what i'm hoping to do or what i was intending to do with this rotary encoder is to select
that base channel so that i could program the light to start with i don't channel 10 so then
this first part would be channel 10 11 12 13 14 15. and that's all well and good except i've run
into some problems in library incompatibilities which is the downside of using arduino libraries
it hides all the ugly gubbins from the beginners which is a good thing
but it also hides what's going on from beginners so it makes it a lot more difficult to figure out
what's going wrong when you've got two libraries trying to use the same resource and just barfing
at you earlier on in my experiments i was using this little uh oled to display the channel number
unfortunately the adafruit supplied library for this thing which is the most common library
and the one almost every tutorial uses is not compatible with or interferes with
the dmx library which again there's there's a couple of libraries that can be used with this
in a couple libraries that can be used as a dmx and i've played with them a little bit and i've
picked the ones that are most commonly used so they have the most tutorials and whatnot
and they just don't want to i couldn't get any of them to to co-exist actually and some
of them just flat didn't work for reasons that escaped me at one point i was going to
try and use the cd4511 led drivers with a handful of seven segment leds but i discovered that i've
only got a couple of common cathode seven separate leds i've got a bunch of common anodes um and this
guy prefers to work with common cathode and like i said i would have had to order some more leds so
that went by the buy um i tried a couple other things and then finally settled on using this lcd
which maybe i will mount it up there or maybe i'll put it over there and just
eat the fact that this thing's gonna be huge it also allowed me a little bit more screen real
estate so i have the channel and then i have the six potentiometer readouts showing on there so i
can tell what i'm doing which seems to eventually be an even better idea than my first idea so the
project evolves so i guess kind of a point of me doing this video is just to show i guess that the
no matter how much experience with the hardware you've got um or the software or whatever there's
always stuff to learn you're always going to run into pitfalls and stuff and i said with my
work i haven't been having enough time to just spend like hours and hours on this it's just
like i said half an hour here an hour there in the evenings in between shifts and whatnot
but i think this is going in the general direction that i wanted it to go
so there's a few other things that i'd like to do with this beast um but i'm going to need some
parts i think i'm going to abandon the rotary encoder i think i am going to stick with this
display um the nano like i said is going to go on the board although with that out of
the way it might fit in a different spot and i think well i've ordered a bunch of dip switches
which might seem a little bit old school and it is and a lot of the early dmx lights
were their address was programmed using dip switches on the back of them guess how often do
you change that um for a traveling show it stays the same throughout the entire run of the show
for a bar install it stays there forever uh for a band that's uh you know on the road playing bar
gigs and whatnot it might change now and again but probably not the only time you really change it
on a frequent basis is if it's in rental system so why not and this circuit board that i'm using it's
some that i got a long time ago in a uh in a mail bag just from a cheap seller on ebay but it's sort
of it's kind of interesting it's not vero board it's not straight up perf board let me get in a
little closer it sort of emulates the track layout on a breadboard we have four pins tied together
there and then we have uh voltage buses in this case i've just designated a positive and negative
and so each vertical strip of uh pair of power buses has a positive and a negative in it it's
interesting it's maybe more versatile than vero board maybe a little bit so less versatile but
also less soldering than using perf board i don't know i think i like it it's it's my first
time using it i bought three or four pieces of it back when i originally bought it and
it seems to be doing the job so i am slowly going through using various bits and pieces that have
accumulated over the years and that's a big part of uh of how i do things is just
order stuff that you think you might need that might be handy and then
when a project comes to mind you've got it all in stock to use it um again i had like
three different display technologies that i uh tinkered with until i settled on this one
the the uh rs 485 chips i bought a whole whack of them because they were cheap and they seemed
like something would come in handy i've had the rotary encoders for probably three or four years
you know it's uh it's not for everybody but it's how i do things and it seems to work out for me
speaking of which and because it's a short video i think i'm just going to set this thing up with
some software and play with that with the light a little bit and if you've got a computer or a
tablet that's got usb out on it you don't need the hardware to control it here you
can just control it all from your computer and that's how a lot of modern lighting desks work
they're essentially just a computer with a custom hardware user interface with you know faders
and knobs and buttons and whatnot but all just being controlled by software so the software
in question all the the freely available one that i grabbed that's compatible with linux and
you know all your other popular computer uh platforms it's called uh cue light controller plus
and it seems to be fairly well recommended especially for uh beginners just starting out
so let's start with the inputs and outputs menu now i've already got my usb device
plugged in and it's recognized here and it's already selected as an output so that's good
you can do all kinds of different output devices or you can even use
artnet which operates over a tcp network if you want to now they must define us a fixture
which is what the devices are called now i could just go with a generic one starts at address one
tell it that it has eight channels because we saw that in the manual earlier
boom there we go remember i was talking about dip switches well if there was a dip switch to select
the channel on the back of this thing there is uh how you'd set it very handy you can define
different parameters for your light i'm not going to do that and now we'll just go over to a simple
lighting desk here and start and bring up the main remember that first one is the main brightness
then the second one is red third one is green blue and the fourth one is white
so there's they're all at max so this is laid out basically like a traditional lighting
console would be and then what do we have here oh yeah that's the strobing right there you go
that is different automatic modes
and then that one is and then eight is the speed of those automatic modes
but again i'm not going to use those ones i don't think they're all that useful for
what i'm intending and actually i don't really need anything past six but you have to program
it to uh to expect all eight of them otherwise if you if you only said i only need the first five
and then you programmed another light to start at six when you operated that light's first channel
it would also operate this one and then the other thing that we can do is we can set up
different submasters here different scenes so right now i've got everything on it full
i'll pull that one up and i will record that cue onto number one let's shut all these guys off here
and now i can control them all together with that one cue or i can
bump or flash them just by tapping that so then i could set up something else put it on there record
that as cue number two okay so then if i go into cue playback mode i can just bump between the cues
so then if you had a lot of lights you could set up
scenes basically or cues they're calling it here for each one and just bump between them so you
don't have to during your performance fly around on these faders up here which is kind of neat and
again most traditional lighting boards had something similar to that now there's a lot
of other stuff going on in here they're talking about the concept of universes so remember i said
there's 512 channels available uh but what happens if you run out of channels well then you create a
second universe you assign that second universe to a different output device and then you've got
another 512 channels in that universe and third and fourth and whatnot um where that comes in
handy is when you've got fixed when you've got a lot of fixtures that use a lot of channels so add
another fixture and we'll just see what we can find here oh let's go for the granddaddy of all
moving fixtures the very light it has 31 channels in that one light alone you could see if you had
a bunch of those in your rig you'd use up your 512 channels right quick in a hurry
so i'm going to edit my light here just to put it up somewhere out of the way so i can
define another one um let's define this stage right 10 watt by 9 led flat par
i just discovered wandering through here it has basically the same layout as my light but when you
look at it on the simple desk it has custom icons which are pretty cool so there is the master which
doesn't do anything until you bring up a color there's the red the green the blue and the white
that is the strobing mode as we saw before that is the just sort of randomly wander
through different colors at its own pace mode and there is the speed for that so that's essentially
the same but it's got custom icons and i assume when you're defining your own you can probably
customize the icons i haven't found that yet but it seems like a pretty obvious thing you should be
able to do but that is just a basic tour of this little piece of software for talking to dmx lights
and for a small band and you just set up a laptop with this you would be sailing um maybe set up
some kind of a button box to control it or a foot switch or something like that just to bump between
from one scene to another from or from one of the cues to another anyway i'm not sure if there's
a huge point to this video today other than just to show what i've been tinkering with and
i guess remind especially beginners not to give up if your project doesn't go the way you want it
you pivot you try something different you tinker with it you get to a frustration point you order
more parts you wait two months for them to show up and you carry on which is what i'm
gonna do with this thing i can't promise it'll show up again although i kind of like it too
but yeah this one i am using in large part as a software learning platform for myself which as
i've said many times i suck at so like even said at the beginning you're probably getting tired of
hearing it but you don't get better unless you play with it in practice right so that's where
this is going and at some point i would like to basically build one of these um from scratch
i don't know when i'm gonna do it i don't know how successful i'm gonna be but
it's worth a challenge and that way then i've got the computer and i can control both of them once
or i can use this thing did i need something like this no absolutely not this is a learning platform
there are commercial devices though handheld boxes made specifically for testing lights in the field
might have been handy for me to have you know a few years ago when i was helping a buddy out doing
band lighting but i don't do that anymore so this is just a toy to play with and learn from which is
yeah like i said that's the important part here anyway thanks for watching
questions and comments down below yeah i'll talk to you later