Hello guys,
I want to built an LED Matrix with VVVV and Arduino. Can anyone of you help me where I should start. Or is in the forum some discription how I can solve this problem?
By the way…It’s important for the project to use the Arduino platform for the electronical stuff and to control the LED’s with VVVV.
ok, so no one answers.
Then another Idea.
Does anyone know how to built a DMX Light Matrix
controlled with the Arduino.
Or has anyone an idea how to start?
i do not know 100% what you want to do , but i few things :
for making a dmx controller with arduino you need a chip 485 and a 100ohms resistor you have tutorial in the arduino playground , i remember a clean example code from tinker for rgb leds .
you can play with pipet for example to get the color of a texture and output to your leds .
there are some aleredy built led matrix for arduino that may help to see the hardware used in arduino playground .
hi roman, dont go to pure dmx stuff with the arduino, signal ( electrically talking) is usually a mess and strange things are occuring with other devices on the chain
Doing an arduino controller with an ethernet shield is a good solution, and cheapper and less complex.
Check my user page, i have a sketch on it to use ethershield, and demultiplexer with art-net. Using ethernet will be easier, and faster.
About your matrix of leds, it depends really about your resolution ( how many leds), and if its colored ( RGB matrix) or monocolor.
dmx fixture, professionnal stuff.
it depends of your needs and constrain
is it for an art installation, or for entertainement, question of budget, and how many days, years, it will play. do you have customers, or is it for the fun or for beauty of art…
agreeing with sanch if its for commercial field
anyway rainbowduino has its own atmega, so you can program it also in standalone. no arduino needed, and arduino compatible for code
Since this is a king of custom matrix rainbowduino might work , problem you could face is bandwith , so updating all this led from vvvv might be very slow.
Also you might have a really huge amount of work building the matrix , i guess you plan do design a pcb for the matrix?
bandwith:
not sure, depends if you are sending a text to be printed or 960 channels. Changing Baudrates from 9600 to higher rates solves usually bandwiths.
You may imagine using different arduino in I2C connexion, to avoid latency, better than one doing all the stuff. Main trouble is time of demultplexion.
artnet and ethernet are difinitively for me the more quick and stable solution to work with an amount of 960 Leds and to interface easely with vvvv or other software, letting to the computer the work of calculations
Thank you all so much for your answers! We decided (dl-110 and me) to use DMX. Because in your answers it semms like that Arduino is the more complex way. If we don’t get this to work, we will ask again! :)
@roman_g - glad you found a solution. What equipment have you decided on? And sorry for trying to hijack your thread :)
@karistouf - yes I’ll be dimming. Have found someone to design me a system based on these http://pdfserv.maxim-ic.com/en/ds/MAX6954.pdf controlled using an artnet to spi driver. We should be able to chain lots of these on the spi bus and it should be a really nice modular and expandable approach.
@sanch - I bought a couple of rainbowduino to have a play with but can’t program them for the life of me! Have tried using an arduino uno, and a usb>serial ttl cable. Neither of them worked. Did you have any trouble with this?