Standard DMX Control of MyKi/Saikoduino

Hey, I’m pretty proud of this. Here we have one of the saikoduinos being controlled directly from a standard DMX control board in HSI mode. Hopefully this video helps explain why I think that HSI is the most natural way to use LED lights in a theatrical setting.

The result is what I think is a very intuitive way to do this kind of lighting. Address 0 sets the hue and Address 1 sets the saturation, so a lighting designer can very easily and quickly find exactly the color they want. Then, Address 2 is used simply to control overall brightness.

I think that this is the most intuitive way to transition from using gels and incandescent lamps to using an LED light; you basically have a digitally controllable “gel” and then an overall brightness. Most importantly, as you turn the light on and off you don’t have to worry about the color changing!

This light is already taking advantage of the advanced features discussed in previous postings, like 16-bit resolution to do good color correction and the use of an optimal HSI to RGB+White conversion routine. It also incorporates a programmable low pass filter on the DMX data coming in to smooth out the often present jerkiness of many manual DMX control boards.

Code is available here for now, it’ll go up on github at some point.