How to start vixen lighting program

Today, we're going to explore the uses of LED strip lighting—a great, simple component that can add a lot of visual impact to any project. LED's provide bright, colorful and in some cases customizable light, and by buying them in strip form you save yourself a lot of time and effort at the soldering bench.

For more Tested. In order to examine the world of flexible lighting, I chose to put together a quick project of my own. I have some problems with the lighting in my living room—particularly when watching movies. With all the overhead lights and lamps turned off, the room gets pitch black, aside from the screen. With any room lights on, glare appears on the TV. So for a simple lighting project, I decided to mount a strip of lights to the back of the screen, to provide a gentle glow for the wall behind it.

Step one was to buy some lights. There are a whole lot of varieties of LED strip lighting on the market right now, but for the most part they fall into three categories, as follows:.

They come in plenty of colors, and are great for providing bright, colorful lighting in fixed location. These are commonly mounted under cabinets or tables to provide a nice recessed glow, or as a source of indirect lighting for home theater setups or display cases. Addressable LED strips are color-changing, like the previous category, but go a step further and include a tiny chip in between each and every LED, allowing you to control them all individually.

They can be used for the most sophisticated lighting projects, or can even act as an art object all on their own. For my project, I decided to go with the RGB addressable strip. I mean, you really should watch the video. I decided on the spot that my TV backlight project is going to have a fiesta mode. In addition to the lighting itself, I needed a power source.

There are a number of solutions, but the most widely used is Arduino. So I went ahead and tossed an Arduino Uno R3 and its power supply into the cart. A few days later I got the parts in the mail, and started the process of building my TV backlight. First, you have to solder leads to the strip of lights. Second, you connect the LED strip to the Arduino and the power source. Each has its pros and cons, which is why I want to go into detail here and share how they each work, and why you should choose one over the other.

That is, how we will structure our different sequences and playlists for the show each night. On top of that, you can set your schedules to be at the same exact times every day, or you can have them run at different times every day! This can be helpful if you only want to run on weekends or if you just want to do fewer hours during a week — a great way to keep the neighbors happy!

Both xLights and Vixen have built-in functionality to run your show completely from within the program. You also can run a LOT of pixels — depending on the computer, you may be able to run over 1 million pixels! I suppose so, but you run the risk of having something go wrong — whether that be a system software update, you forget to leave the scheduler open, or someone shuts down the computer.

I kept it fully offline and set it up to shut down and re-start itself every day. Every 10 days or so, I briefly connected it to the internet to sync the clock, which would get off by a minute or 2. If you try to patch too few lights to the outputs of the controller, the outputs will simply not be filled all the way. At this point in your display, you generally want to think about what port of each controller each prop will plug in to.

Then, patch each prop to the appropriate port. It is important to know that you can change this later, and it will not affect any sequencing work that you have already done. This will open up a Setup Preview Screen. For this example, I just used the Google Maps street view photo, which I took a screenshot of. For best results find or take a photo of your home from the angle that most viewers of your display will see it from.

To begin laying out the lights you will see the elements you already added located on the left sidebar. With the Basic Drawing, you want to use this for the non-pixel items. You can change any of these settings as needed to make your preview easy to see and matched to how your actual display looks. This will open your Sequence Editor screen.

Vertically will be the time slots and Horizontally will be your different elements and effects. The music will then be added to your sequence. The effects will be located on the left sidebar. To add these to your sequence, simply drag and drop them into the desired time slots.

The effects editor will be located on the right sidebar where you can preview the sequence and adjust the parameters as needed.