Arduino-Based, High Powered LED Lighting Over Wi-Fi 114
Gibbs-Duhem writes "This awesome video was produced by some MIT engineers recently. They've started a fully open-source, open-hardware high power LED lighting project that they designed to be modular enough to control with the Arduino (or any other control system). Using their open-source firmware, you can set up the Arduino to connect to Wi-Fi and receive Open Sound Control packets. Then, they went further and released open-source software for PureData and Python to do music analysis and make the lights flash brilliantly in time with the music! A full Instructable was also posted in addition to the existing documentation for design and assembly on their website."
So .... ? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a bunch of LEDs glowing with a music. Hardly awesome, especially for slashdot crowd, who for sure knows that blinking a LED (or even four or five) is not rocket science. That's the first step for every Arduino beginner.
make the lights flash brilliantly in time with the music! Whow ! THAT is impressive ! Let's throw some exclamation marks ! !!!!! !!!! !
So, I think I missed something. Seriously, MIT students made some LEDs glow according to a music. Fourrier, (very) basic electronic. Is MIT a college now ?
Re:Arduino again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You program Arduinos in C++. The IDE thing that comes with it basically wraps some boilerplate around your code, runs it through avr-gcc and uploads it with avrdude.
There's nothing to stop you writing something from scratch to run on an Arduino board, and even pulling in some of the useful libraries that people have created for it. I actually prefer to write my code in gedit and use a fairly normal Makefile to make and upload the code.
The progress is amazing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So .... ? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you don't know how to code in C or if you're not a programmer to begin with, Arduino is fine. But for MIT students, if find it weird.
You can't say 'performance aside' in the real world. If your C code can run on a 4 MHz AVR but your Arduino code requires a 8 MHz part to do the same job, you're potentially costing your company a lot of money*.
* I'm talking millions+ of units here, for 1 to 1000 units the cost difference between the two parts is almost negligible.
Re:I have the perfect band to use this with (Score:1, Insightful)
LED Zeppelin
Dear Mods: Parent post was a joke.
Wake me up... (Score:3, Insightful)
The code looks useful, but I'm getting paid $14 an hour. If I want to build RGB mood lighting for my house, I'm going to need a lot more than one unit. I can get 20 feet of RGB strip for $200, and they want $350 for a little 800-lumen flashlight board.
Re:$800 ?! (Score:3, Insightful)
No offense taken. I'm aware of the competition. No harm in trying though =) Every club I've taken them to so far has been pretty interested in them, but really the target market in terms of clubs is a place without any existing lighting, not a club with $300k+ of lighting already. The advantages of being wifi controlled from a computer, having a flex arm to point it wherever you want, and free software to do music analysis and light control without requiring actually hiring a lighting engineer is significant... if you don't already own lots and lots of DMX based lighting.
When it comes down to it though, I can't sell them at a loss, and "Made in America" carries a high price tag, especially for low quantity goods. If I was making 1000 at a time in Chinese factories, yeah, I could make them $300 each. But I don't want to manufacture in China, I want to manufacture someplace where employees don't commit suicide due to low pay and high stress. I figure it's the least I can do as an American citizen.
In any case, you're not the target market quite yet.
Step 1: Build hobbyist light in small quantities, targeted for people with minimal electronics experience and at clubs without existing light infrastructure.
Step 2: Build DMX -> OSC converter and stabilize software so that it is able to control DMX lights as well.
Step 3: Build large enough quantities to get the price down to the $400-500 ballpark.
Step 4: Market to clubs like the one you presumably work for.
And once I am at that point, I can hopefully just give the lights away to hackers to do cool projects with =)