DIY Theatrical Lighting Control with Arduino #Arduino #ArtTuesday
Over the last few years more and more theater folks are using Arduino and other DIY computing platforms to light their shows. Why? Less expensive, more control, greater opportunities for fiddling, fixing, making, and re-making.
This is the future of theatrical technology. And of course the younglings know.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
25 years ago I did something similar for my bachelor’s senior year project. Except that with nothing resembling an Arduino, it took me an entire academic year: One semester to design, wirewrap(!), and write firmware for an ISA-to-DMX board (“ISA” was the original 8-bit PC expansion card interface) for an IBM PC. It had its own onboard 8088 processor for handling realtime crossfade calculations and dual ported memory to communicate with the host PC. It took the second semester to write a text-GUI application on the PC to allow the user to author and run scene transitions, crossfades, and chases.
This was fantastic!
25 years ago I did something similar for my bachelor’s senior year project. Except that with nothing resembling an Arduino, it took me an entire academic year: One semester to design, wirewrap(!), and write firmware for an ISA-to-DMX board (“ISA” was the original 8-bit PC expansion card interface) for an IBM PC. It had its own onboard 8088 processor for handling realtime crossfade calculations and dual ported memory to communicate with the host PC. It took the second semester to write a text-GUI application on the PC to allow the user to author and run scene transitions, crossfades, and chases.