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.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
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.