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Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

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Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#61

Post by solarkraft »

justwalt wrote: post #43
simap wrote: post #23

If you want to get a feel for what you can make, you can browse published patterns here: https://electromage.com/patterns/ I was interviewed by embedded.fm about Pixelblaze and some other projects https://www.embedded.fm/episodes/220 Might be interesting to other folks wanting to do something similar, we cover some of the meta around making and selling a DIY thing and learning things along the way. Highly recommend t…

What are your plans with respect to open source? I’d love to contribute to the effort!

https://github.com/simap/pixelblaze:

> Pixelblaze itself isn't open source (yet)

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#63

Post by simap »

justwalt wrote: post #43
simap wrote: post #23

If you want to get a feel for what you can make, you can browse published patterns here: https://electromage.com/patterns/ I was interviewed by embedded.fm about Pixelblaze and some other projects https://www.embedded.fm/episodes/220 Might be interesting to other folks wanting to do something similar, we cover some of the meta around making and selling a DIY thing and learning things along the way. Highly recommend t…

What are your plans with respect to open source? I’d love to contribute to the effort!

It's something I've considered. I've released many of the components as well as the entire expansion board project https://github.com/simap/pixelblaze_sensor_board And the network sync and control app https://github.com/simap/Firestorm I'm still figuring out how to make that work commercially so that I can afford to continue development on it - ideas welcome!

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#64

Post by rorosaurus »

simap wrote: post #38
Cynddl wrote: post #6

How does this compare to FastLED [1] on the same ESP8266 (and ESP32) platform? FastLED is free and open source, and support almost all LED drivers out there. Writing animations with FastLED might not be as easy as with Pixelblaze, but similarly only requires a few lines of code. [1] https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED

Author of Pixelblaze here :) FastLED is an awesome LED driver library with colorspace and fast math functions. I highly recommend it. Pixelblaze is that plus a web interface, compiler, IDE, and pattern library all over WiFi. You can reprogram your work remotely without cables, and all real-time, or even on a phone. I found that quickly iterating I could get a better intuitive sense of the changes I was making and get…

Thanks for this reply! I was curious too, since I just spent the last few weeks working with an esp8266 on FastLED.

One type of shield/expansion I'd love to see for the Pixelblaze would be some sort of lipo charger and protection circuitry. My favorite esp8266 board has an integrated battery holder for an 18650, and I've found this to be my favorite way of powering all my projects!

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#66

Post by StavrosK »

solarkraft wrote: post #59
StavrosK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I just noticed it's closed source. Too bad :/

Followed the same path as you. Of course the hardware is ridiculously expensive, as it happens when you spin your own stuff (needlessly). Will have look into rendering the patterns & streaming over sACN (a DMX-derived, seemingly standard protocol mentioned in another comment).

Which do you mean is expensive? The hardware costs around $5.

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#67

Post by pixelface »

tibbon wrote: post #47
sdwisely wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we've had really great results with TD tops into madmapper (via syphon/spout) on some installs 6000+ too.

Yea, some combination of that for projection mapping, and perhaps sending directly out to Artnet/sACN for LEDs, servos and lasers? Still trying to piece it together as things get bigger and bigger. My contact information is in my profile. Can you reach out? I'd love to see some of the stuff you're doing and ask a question or two.

on jobs we use pixlite controllers for controlling lots of addressables and send it artnet out of touchdesigner. no need to involve madmapper as touchdesigner handles all the mapping you could possibly want without adding the latency of piping out to madmapper. if you're just doing hobby projects you can stream serial out of touch via USB to a teensy 3.2 and control (in my experience) around 4000 LEDs at ~60fps. for lasers you should check out the etherdream, simple and works well. servo control you'll need a board but generating the software side in touchdesigner is simple.

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#68

Post by pixelface »

SethTro wrote: post #8

I'm working on several medium sized LED projects and am curious if anyone has a guide or links to buying WS2812 or similar strands. I've bought a ~10 of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZHB9M6A/ref=oh_aui_sear... but I would love to find a slightly cheaper source. Alibaba seems to sell them at half the cost but product titles, photos, and descriptions don't ever seem to match

ray wu on aliexpress/ebay(I think?) has a good reputation and is widely used

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#70

Post by solarkraft »

StavrosK wrote: post #66
solarkraft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Followed the same path as you. Of course the hardware is ridiculously expensive, as it happens when you spin your own stuff (needlessly). Will have look into rendering the patterns & streaming over sACN (a DMX-derived, seemingly standard protocol mentioned in another comment).

Which do you mean is expensive? The hardware costs around $5.

The Pixelblaze guy wants 30$ for his ESP8266 board (I get mine for 2,7€/piece). A lot of that money probably doesn't go into the development of the software, but manufacturing and shipping.

I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2].

This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaze is probably very well written and has some great features (and infrastructure, I'm considering writing a parser for the patterns). However I don't want to pay a gigantic markup for a weird ESP8266 board and have to wait for it to ship to me, supporting (while sinking a large part of the money into stupid overhead) the development of software that isn't even open source.

[0]: http://openpixelcontrol.org/

[1]: https://github.com/ppelleti/esp-opc-server

[2]: https://github.com/zestyping/openpixelcontrol/tree/master/py...

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