Power Line Carrier Controller with built in power supply

dmoore

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Houston, TX, USA
I'm not sure how many of you follow the LOR board but a few weeks ago, this popped up:

http://lightorama.mywowbb.com/forum89/24338-1.html

Controller_and_Bulbs.png

It is the Cosmic Color Bulbs from LOR. What this is is the "standard" form factor of pixel nodes, driven at some voltage higher than 5v from a built-in power supply attached directly to the controller. What's really unique about this design - is that the signal comes over the power line along with the power for the controller. So, this means that you don't need a signal cable - just power to the controller.

Now the back story is that this complete design (less the SPI interface) was designed by a guy here in town last year. I've seen it work and it works amazingly well and it's super clean since all you have is the lights attached to what looks like a wall-wart - no signal cables, no additional power supplies. The guy that designed this controller, which talks LOR (with the 512 controller channel extensions) and DMX, showed the completed design to LOR last year in an effort to see if they would purchase it, well it appears they hemmed and hawed and now have developed what is pretty much the same product, excluding the pixel support (his designed had a built in 4 channel RGB+W controller.) This guy is now looking to either sell the entire design (schematics, firmware and the PC based configuration/flashing application) or do a per-unit licence (~$1-2 per unit).

There are a bunch of other features he's come up with on the software side that also make it pretty unique also - the ability to flash specific controllers while still connected on the line with others and also reset controller address/address ranges without disconnecting from the entire network. It also has the ability to take the entire network configuration layout and export it to excel and LOR so you don't have to set it up in those applications. There is also controller grouping (making several controllers act like one but still have seperate addresses), the ability to run sequences directly from the controller (al-la LOR) a number of other features.

He's wondering if there is any interest in someone with the marketing, sales and capital abilities to take this to a publicly avaiaible item. It would seem to be a great option for someone to sell since it's fully LOR able, DMX ready and development time would be nearly nothing. The design is based on Microchip PICs. Totally "one off" hand built costs were in the $30 range with 1000 quanity somewhere in the low teens.

Here is a video demo of the device in operation:

Quad color addressable LED light strings

Let me know and I can put you in touch with him.[/attach]
 
fathead45 said:
pretty cool idea. i kinda wish the tp could do that but with running 2 universe that is alot of amps to try to account for.

Based on the LOR stuff and RJ's stuff - it looks like having the ability to run these strings at high voltages could resolve some, if not all of these issues. Since you could fit in a 20v+ power supply into that control box, you could run quite a few nodes off that single controller.
 
I guess the big question is how many channels could a "data over power" system handle at once?

In the video he shows 72 (56 + 16) channels. I know very little about LOR. Is it limited to 512 channels?
 
David_AVD said:
I guess the big question is how many channels could a "data over power" system handle at once?

In the video he shows 72 (56 + 16) channels. I know very little about LOR. Is it limited to 512 channels?

I talked with him today and he says four universes of DMX shouldn't be a problem on a single power line, even on long distances.

He's also looking at if it would be useful to have the devices talk E131 directly...so in the tranceiver you would supply a e131 stream directly instead of single universes/networks.
 
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