light9 in 2008

Drew Perttula

http://bigasterisk.com/

Existing system

               (play cmds)
    ascoltami --------------> mpd ----------> audio out
        | (timing)
        v
    curvecalc    subcomposer    keyboardcomposer
        |            |                 |
        +---         |             ----+
            \-----   |    --------/
                  \--+---/
                     | (light levels)
                     v
                 dmxserver
                    | (dmx levels)
          ......... v ....................
          .      entec open dmx          .
          .         | (dmx)              . external hardware
          .         v                    .
          .      dmx dimmer              .
          .         | (juice)            .
          .         v                    .
          .      light                   .
          ................................

External libraries

• Twisted - event loop and networking, xmlrpc
• tk, tix
• pympd - my twisted interface to mpd
• louie - signals
• mpd - music player daemon
• rdflib
• darcs

What's new: real sliders

• $200 board with 8 motorized faders (plus knobs, lights, and buttons)
• Talks midi or usb-midi
• Python/linux driver is easy:

self.dev = open("/dev/snd/midiC1D0")
 b0, which, value = [ord(b) for b in self.dev.read(3)]
 self.dev.write(chr(0xb0) + chr(which[0]) + chr(int(value)))

What's new: RDF for most data storage

• Old system: ad-hoc text files. Never do this.
• Now: most files are RDF data (saved as .n3 or ntriples)
complex data structures (objects with types and attributes, attrs, lists, sets, references between files) use DSLs to abbreviate boring parts

What's new: lightsim

• We could really use a good way to preview scenes
• Lighting follows the superposition principle
• Original version from 2002: Tk, PIL
• Current version: qt, OpenGL

Related projects