I feel really badly about not posting anything since last October. I have so much I want to share with you, but I’ve been really busy and there aren’t enough hours in the day to write it all down! Although I know (well, hope really) that you enjoy my super-detailed posts on each of my projects, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer for that. This post will just give you an overview of everything I have going on now.
Reno Neon Line
All three of the sculpture-lighting project I described in my October update are moving forward, with a few twist and turns. Bee Dance has moved to the back burner for now, and likely won’t include any of the internal lighting that I described, at the artist’s request. We’ll instead focus on brighter external lighting and maybe some cool lighting effects around the perimeter of the installation. I still like the “LED core” concept, and I’ll develop a prototype to gauge its applicability to future projects.
The design work for Desert Guard is complete, and we’re preparing for the implementation phase. There will be lots of external lighting, using a very versatile DMX-controlled wash light fixture, the Chauvet Professional COLORado 1 Solo, which has an IP65 outdoor-use rating. We’ll be using about 30 of these, mounted on four poles and at ground level surrounding the (huge) sculpture. There will also be ~8 of these fixtures mounted on and inside the artwork to provide additional highlighting. Two of them will be used to backlight red glass eyes that will be installed in the currently-vacant eye sockets.
For the first time, my lighting animations will be synchronized with music and sound effects that will be played through a DMX-controlled audio playback system and speakers that will be installed in the art plaza. And another first: this project won’t use any addressable LEDs, just a whole lotta’ high-power RGBW wash fixtures with controllable beam angle.
Since October a couple of additional Neon Line projects have fallen into my lap. One of them is Jibaro Soy by Puerto Rican artist Mark Rivera (aka Kidnetick). At right is a cool video showing the original Burning Man lighting. This lighting was only intended to be temporary, so my job is to retain the same look while using components that are fully weatherproof and very durable.
Peter Hazel Art
The Octopus sculpture that I described in my January 2023 update has finally been completed and installed in Morro Bay, California. The customer (outdoor shopping mall) is very happy with it, and I’ll get more pictures when I attend the grand opening in a couple of months. Now Peter is refurbishing the original Octavius that was built for Burning Man 2016. So I’m building a replica of the controller used for the Morro Bay octopus.
And the Desert Shark is still circling…Peter hasn’t yet found a buyer, but he plans to display it, along with Octavius, at the Napa Lighted Art Festival that starts in late January. He’s made some major modifications, including the removal of all the white exoskeleton lighting. The glass scales are now mounted directly to the metal exoskeleton, resulting in a more streamlined appearance during daytime. We’ve previously struggled with an approach to illuminate the stainless steel fins, and this time we’re trying something completely new. We’re attaching side-emitting fiber optic material to the perimeter of each of the three fins and tail. The 4mm diameter fiber will be lit by eight “illuminator” units that I built using a 3W blue LED. The fiber brightness is pretty reasonable up to about 8 feet (2.4m), and we’re using two illuminators for each fin.
Another big change is a completely new pedestal for the shark. It will be based on the “Wave” concept described in this post, about 8 feet (2.4m) wide and 5 feet (1.5m) tall. I think this is going to look really cool, and I’ll write more about as work progresses and I can get some photos.
Controllers
The Neon Line projects have forced me to learn some new tricks. The customer wants all (or at least most) of the controller electronics for each artwork to be installed inside a large temperature-controlled enclosure (an IDF cabinet). It’s great that the controller will be protected from moisture and temperature extremes, but the IDF cabinet is sometimes up to 60 feet (18m) away from the artwork. That means that all of the interfaces to the LEDs and light fixtures must operate over these distances. That’s not a problem for the “stage lighting” type fixtures like the Chauvet fixture mentioned above, since they use the DMX512 protocol transmitted across an EIA-485 (RS-485) differential signal interface at 250 Kbps. This interface is specified to operate correctly at distances up to 1300 feet (400m) with up to 32 attached loads (receivers).
It’s a different story for addressable LED strips. As most of you probably know, the 800 KHz single-ended (non-differential) interface used by many addressable LED strips (e.g., WS28xx) doesn’t work reliably at distances of more than about 30 feet (9m). Since at least two of the Neon Line projects use addressable LED strips, this is a problem that had to be addressed.
Another issue is that the customer has a strong preference to use only commercially-available hardware with all of the usual safety and emissions certifications (FCC, CE, TUV, etc.). So instead of using my own controller board designs, I had to consider using commercial off-the-shelf products. This wouldn’t be the first time: if you recall from my September 2023 update, I used a Falcon F16v4 controller for last year’s Burning Man project. But even widely-used board this is still considered a “hobbyist” product, not up to the customer’s standards. That led me to discover a whole new world of lighting controllers used for stage/theatre lighting, architectural lighting, and very large art installations. Although these controllers are very expensive, they have all the necessary features and certifications.
For Jibaro Soy, which uses lots of addressable LED strips in addition to DMX wash fixtures, I chose the Advatek Pixlite T8-S Mk3 controller and its associated Pixlite R4D-S long-range receiver units.
Each of the R4D-S receivers can drive four LED strips, and I’ll mount six of these units at various places inside the sculpture to drive all the LED strips. These can be placed up to 300m from the controller, and are connected with CAT6 cable. Each receiver unit (mounted inside a weatherproof enclosure) will have its own 150W IP67 power supply mounted alongside.
The T8-S has a single DMX output (which supports a single universe of 512 channels), which is adequate to drive all of the Chauvet DMX fixtures that will be used to light the outside of the sculpture.
Since Desert Guard uses lots of DMX fixtures and no LED strips, I chose a different controller, the Enttec S-Play SP1-1. This unit has similar standalone playback capabilities as the Advatek controller, but provides two DMX interfaces.
I’ll write more about these controllers as I gain more experience.
Software
One of the advantages of using a commercial controller is that they are compatible with a wide range of software for designing the lighting sequences/animations. This is due to their standardized use of DMX channel data for transferring lighting color/brightness information from a computer to the controller. This DMX data is most commonly transmitted across an ethernet interface one of two popular packet formats: Art-Net or sACN (streaming architecture for control networks), also known as ANSI E1.31.
Most of these lighting design software packages (running on a PC or Mac) provide a sophisticated graphical user interface for designing lighting effects, sequences, and color palettes. Many of them provide a graphical 2D or 3D visualization capability that lets you view the simulated results of your lighting sequences, without any controller or light fixtures attached. Then, with hardware attached, the software can stream “live” Art-Net or sACN data to various types of hardware controller units that translate the data to the format required by the lighting fixtures.
These software packages can be used with several types of controller hardware. In the simplest configuration, a “DMX gateway” unit (example) translates the streamed Art-Net/sACN data to one or more physical DMX interfaces (with each interface corresponding to a single “universe” of 512 8-bit data channels). These DMX interfaces are typically connected, in a daisy-chain configuration, to multiple light fixtures that support a DMX control interface. Another type of controller, a “pixel controller” (example) is used to interface with addressable LED strips/strings. A pixel controller receives a specific range of DMX channels from the ethernet interface and converts this pixel data to the format required by the LEDs (e.g., WS28xx protocol). Typically, each consecutive group of three 8-bit DMX channels is used to generate the 24 bits of RGB data needed for each addressable pixel. For non-commercial applications, it’s common to use an ESP32 microcontroller board running the WLED firmware as a pixel controller.
A third type of controller, a “show controller”, can record a complete sequence of Art-Net/sACN data from the computer and store it on a microSD card. Then, a sophisticated set of scheduling and triggering capabilities can be used to play back the recorded sequence in a standalone configuration, without the computer attached. The Enttec S-Play SP1-1 that I’m using for Desert Guard is an example of a show controller. The Advatek Pixlite T8-S Mk3 that I’m using for Jibaro Soy is actually a hybrid, with both pixel controller and show controller capabilities. Another common show controller implementation is a Raspberry Pi microcontroller board running FPP (Falcon Player) firmware.
There is a surprisingly diverse array of lighting design software packages available, and choosing among them is a daunting task. This plethora of choices is partly due to the wide range of applications: stage/theatre, dance clubs, architectural (interior/exterior), holiday lighting, art installations, etc. I’m still in the process of evaluating some of the top candidates for my applications, and haven’t made any final decisions yet. Although xLights, which I used for last year’s Burning Man project, is mostly aimed at holiday lighting applications, it is a leading contended for projects involving addressable LEDs. Although it has its frustrations, it has tons of built-in effects and I’ve become pretty comfortable using it. One downside is that its support for DMX fixtures is weak, and unlike most other packages, it has no built-in library of common DMX fixtures.
Another leading contender is Chamsys MagicQ. It runs on a Mac (a requirement for me), and the cost is low (essentially free), but it has a steep learning curve. Fortunatly there are lots of free video tutorials and support forums. Stay tuned for more on this.
Custom Controllers
Although I’ll be using off-the-shelf controllers for the Neon Line projects, I’m continuing to develop my family of custom controllers. Here’s a summary of the current and upcoming family members:
FLiCr – This has been my workhorse board for a couple of years. As a standalone controller, it has 8 outputs that can drive addressable LEDs or individual PWM-controlled devices/LEDs. It can also be used as a master controller in a distributed system, using an RS-485 serial bus (SlicBus) for communication with the SLiC v2 or SLiC v3 boards shown below. It has 3 switch/sensor inputs and a microSD card slot for storing FireScript sequences and color palettes.
SLiC v2 and v3 – These boards were designed to be “remote” controllers operating under commands from a master controller board. SLiC v2 (below left) can drive eight 12V LED strips or two RGBW 12-24V PWM-controlled fixtures. SLiC v3 (below right) can drive eight 12-24V PWM-controlled devices/LEDs, up to 14A total. Both of these board types were used for Desert Shark, with a FLiCr board as the master.
Flex v2 – This is a new board that hasn’t been used in a project yet. It can operate as a standalone controller, as a master, or as a remote. It can drive eight RGBW 12-24V PWM-controlled fixtures with 12-bit PWM resolution. To achieve this large number of high-resolution PWM channels, it uses two 16-channel PCA9685 LED driver chips. The Teensy 4.0 MCU communicates with this chip via an I2C interface. A MOSFET on each output channel provides high current-sinking capability, up to 14A total for the board.
Ion v1 – This is a brand-new board that I’m still testing. It can be used as a master controller, communicating with the SLiC v2/v3 boards via an optically-isolated RS-485 interface. This interface can also be configured as a single-universe DMX output port to communicate with DMX light fixtures. Or it can be configured as a DMX input, enabling it to accept commands and data from an off-the-shelf DMX show controller.
The Ion controller has eight addressable LED outputs, but these are implemented as differential (i.e. “long range”) interfaces to be received by the FlexRx receiver board described below. For even more flexibility in controlling physically-distant fixtures, the Ion board also has a differential implementation of the I2C bus using the PCA9615 I2C bus buffer chip. This interface is used to communicate with one or more I2cRX receiver boards described below.
FlexRx Receiver – This board receives four differential (twisted pair) interfaces from the Ion controller and converts them into a single-ended LED data signal for each of the four LED strip outputs. Power for the LED strips can be supplied from the Ion controller or from a dedicated local power supply. Each LED output is fused with a resettable 3.3A PTC fuse.
I2cRX Receiver – Up to 16 of these boards can be daisy-chain connected to the differential I2C bus from the Ion controller (using Cat6 twisted pair cable). Each board uses the PCA9685 LED driver chip (same as the Flex v2 controller) to drive four RGBW 12-24V PWM-controlled fixtures. Power can be supplied from the Ion controller (on the CAT6 cable) or from a local power supply.
Wrap Up
Well, that was a bit more detail than I intended, so thanks for hanging with me. There’s actually even more going on, but I’ll save that for the next update.
As always, feel free to provide feedback and ask questions. I’m happy to help.
Thanks for reading! In case you haven’t already discovered this, an index of all 40 of my previous blog posts can be found here.
Electric Fire Design 