Adruino dmx lighting

[adambrum]

Ok this may be a good idea or a total non starter but here goes.

 

Before i start this is not for a build its just me playing about with leds

 

I have built a interface for my profilux to control buckpucks (0-10v to pwm) which works great i also added a lcd to i could see what the lights were doing, got bored with that and started looking at other led drivers.

 

The ones that caught my eye are the eldoled drivers, the bigger units are easy with so many different inputs but they are a bit on the bulky side so i looked at there in fixture driver which only takes dmx.

 

I thought about there dali to dmx bridge but that started to look expensive after buying the bridge and then a dali card for my profilux and after all i dont need that many channels.

 

Quick search on google and i found a dmx shield for the arduinio and the program seems quite simple so a plan started to hatch, i can get 4 0-5v channels from my profilux and all i have to do is convert the 0-5v to 255-0 and let the arduino do its thing with the dmx signal.

 

So if the plan works i can have a 4 channel driver capable of driving 24 leds and the drivers can be daisy chained for bigger arrays.

 

Heres the links for the drivers/dmx shield

driver

dmx shield

 

So good idea ?

[evilc66]

Sure. It's certainly not a bad idea

[adambrum]

I have been doing a little more research on this project and ordered a few parts.

 

Good news is the chip for arduino to dmx is about $3 and really simple to use with a arduino dmx library.

 

Not so good is the price of the drivers, about $110 for the lm-dot which is 150w but this maybe able to run 9 leds per channel and 36 total. So a little more expensive than buckpucks but these drivers have adjustable output from 350ma -1400ma which can be set on the board.

 

i think where this driver will come into its own is when you want more than one you can just daisy chain across to the next one no extra wires from the controller.

[cptbjorn]

I just checked out the datasheet a bit, there's no comparing it to buckpucks if it works as described. 15-bit resolution dimming means you can dim your main array down to moonlight levels with accurate moon phases if you want. At the very least you could use the arduino ADCs to read the 0-5vdc signal and pass on the 10-bit value to the driver, but you could also have the profilux toggle the arduino between night and day modes and have it run a more intricate dimming program.

 

Anyways that driver looks awesome, that's how they should have been made all along.

[adambrum]

I think in the past the dmx control put people off me included but after looking at the dmx shield for the arduino which is just a max485 chip and using the dmxsimple library it should be very straight forward.

 

Im going to use the analog inputs to read 4 profilux channels one of which is the moon use another for a temp probe to activate the fans and add a 2x16 lcd display to make it look all flashy but just for now i have 4 10k pots simulating the 0-5v output from the profilux

 

Spoke to eldoled this morning about running just one led off each channel just for testing as i could not find any minimum specs for each channel they tell me that the driver can go down to a single led but to keep an eye on the temp as the input is still 24v-32v

[adambrum]

been playing the last couple of days knocking up a test rig and its working,

 

For testing i brought a dmx shield for the arduino just to make life easy next bit is to remove the shield and just use the bare chip and add the lcd.

 

So far the driver has shown no problems or heat even though im only using 4 cheap 10w leds which only use 10v and the supply is 24v.

 

Piccy time and the second is a video

 

 

Quick edit,

 

I just swapped the expensive shield for a $3 max485 chip and it still works fine then added the pots and 20x4 lcd to show output of each channel just need to do the temp control and shrink it all down to a smaller board

[TheWAND]

This I like.