PixLite Strobe Light Firmware

[ltay13]

Last week a couple of people contacted me to ask if we could write firmware for our PixLite 16 controller that could control the WS2811 strobes that Ray Wu has been making because there isn't an existing solution.

Here's a clip of what we came up with (although only running on a standard WS2811 string not a strobe one):

Standard WS2811 String - Strobe Test

So far it has the following control using sACN channels:

1: Flash intensity
2: Fill
3: Flash duration
4: Flash frequency

If anyone has any ideas/requests/comments please let us know.

 

[kane]

Can you give a bit more explanation on the control side of things - are there 4 channels used which control the whole string, and based on the values of those 4 channels, you control the strobe string?

Thanks!

 

[ltay13]

What I am thinking is increasing to 16 intensity channels, so you control the on/off/intensity state of each string individually, but keeping the other 3 channels common to all. I.E. you might want to chase the strings, but they could all flash at the same speed.


Apart from keeping the firmware simple we also want to keep it simple for the user. So we don't want to have all 4 options for each string resulting in 64 channels to run the strobes. What are your thoughts on that?

 

[kane]

Agree in trying to keep it simple!

I'm trying to get my head around how these would be sequenced from LSP/LOR etc.. Obviously intensity specifies the brightness, so would allow you to ramp-up to full brightness, and ramp-down to "off", so that's all good.


Ideally, it'd be good if via the configuration screens, you could set a default value for the fill/flash duration/flash frequency, which would mean that many people would get away with a single channel per output.. (otherwise, I'm guessing that the default setting would be zero?)


Obviously anyone that wants more control can override those values via the 3 extra channels.. Not sure how viable this is, but certainly would simply things?

 

[ltay13]

Sounds like a good idea. Sounds like more work haha, but will do.