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Arduino-Based, High Powered LED Lighting Over Wi-Fi

Posted by Soulskill on from the hacking-up-some-trippiness dept.

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."

17 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. I have the perfect band to use this with by digitaldc · · Score: 4, Funny

    LED Zeppelin

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
    1. Re:I have the perfect band to use this with by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 2, Funny

      HA!

      I just got it.

  2. Okay by Sylak · · Score: 2, Informative
    EDMX/ETCNet is still going to remain the control standard for using Wifi to control lights, especially when DMX information is readily available online.

    This method will probably only lend way to hobbiests who can't justify purchasing the equipment, when even DJs use DMX now. (Although Net2 touring nodes are relatively cheap now, and Net2 compatible light boards are popping up on eBay with the new generation of light boards replacing the old ones)

    1. Re:Okay by makkbe · · Score: 2, Informative

      Art-Net (although completely worthless, just as ETCNet) is much more widespread than ETCNet looking outside the US, even over WiFi. But while you're building something like this, why not go for an open protocol that is really designed for controlling lights, such as BSR E1.31? Plain stupid in my eyes; I'll have to fix their firmware. On another note, using WiFi for lighting control is idiotic. WiFi is no way near stable enough to provide a decent transport for time critical protocols.

  3. Re:Arduino again? by Gordonjcp · · Score: 4, 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.

  4. Relaxen und watchen by Arancaytar · · Score: 2, Funny

    Das Blinkenlichten. :)

    1. Re:Relaxen und watchen by thewils · · Score: 2, Funny

      Sorry, spelling Nazi here; "Die" Blinkenlichten!

      --
      Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
    2. Re:Relaxen und watchen by Professr3 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Dude, RELAXEN

  5. The progress is amazing by m2shariy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Just imagine that in the 70s people used to do the same kind of stuff with just a few transistors :)

  6. Wake me up... by Professr3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... when this costs less than $800 per unit.

    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.

    1. Re:Wake me up... by Gibbs-Duhem · · Score: 3, Informative

      As the designer, we tried to take people like you into account. If you're willing to solder your own boards and deal with heat sinking on your own, you can buy bare boards and use the Digikey BOM we made available on the documentation page to make your own for perhaps $100-$200 not including whatever you value your time at.

      There's also a 5% discount using the coupon code hobb123.

      Feel free to join the development lists if you want to get more ideas about how to do a less expensive system. I certainly want one too... but most of the cheap RGB fixtures out there are, in my opinion, unhackable garbage. RGB strips are cool though, if you just want mood lighting.

      w/r/t the comment below about 800 lumens being as bright as a standard 60W light bulb, I should point out why, although true, that's not actually a sane comparison.

      First, the lights here is colored to start with. Take a 60W incandescent and filter out everything but red, and you have a very dim light.

      Second, it is 800 lumens because we used royal blue (extremely pretty color) instead of standard blue. The difference in perceptible brightness, in my opinion and the opinion of everyone who has seen a side by side comparison, is that there is no difference. However, the conversion from lumens to watts declares that it is 200 lumens dimmer. I think that there is a serious flaw in the way we calculate bright-adjusted conversion factors.

      Third, the light is focused into a tight cone, meaning we lose almost no light due to light going "up" into the fixture. In a standard 60W, you're spending about half your light illuminating the ceiling. We don't do that, so the lux (lumens per square meter) is much higher. Try looking directly into one of these lights for more than a second, and you'll understand the difference.

      There is a difference between 60W from a white incandescent and a 800 lumen LED fixture. Yes, technically the number of lumens thrown out are the same, and it would be dumb to use the LED light to produce white light, but for colored light it is at least an order of magnitude brighter.

  7. $800 ?! by Speare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Okay, I've done some Arduino stuff myself, and am familiar with the pricing on typical custom PCBs from Sparkfun. So I checked out the Saiko5 product page.

    I mentally added up the custom wifi shield, the custom LED driver board, the LEDs, the Arduino itself, and thought damn, I bet they're gonna offer this for nearly a hundred bucks. Add on a rubber duck antenna, some wall wart or LIPO for power, and a basic case, and that's more like $150. Then I see the photos of heavy duty bomb-proof cases which appear to be machine-bent-then-anodized aluminum plate. Even 2mm plate is overkill and this looks a lot thicker. That's silly thick and heavy, even for stage pyrotechnics units, and it's gonna cost. There's no way I'd be interested in $200 for such a device, especially since they'd work best in grid/swarm configurations. The altogether price they offered was four times that, at $800. Even factoring for (1) niche market, (2) assembly disincentive [prefer DIY assembly], and (3) low count factory runs, this price is out of all sensibility.

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    1. Re:$800 ?! by Gibbs-Duhem · · Score: 5, Informative

      Dear Speare,

      As the person who designed the device and the case, I have to question your ability to do a valid cost analysis, but if you'd be interested in helping out with bringing the cost down we'd love to have you. You can join our hardware mailing list at http://saikoled.com/mailinglists/ Wramsdel is completely correct, I have to pay the initial software developers who spent hundreds of hours developing the base system so that it was in a usable state, and I think it's not terribly fair to argue that the thousand plus hours I put into design, prototyping, assembly, and programming is not valuable. This is a one-man shop, and it's taken me three years to get from my original light fixture covered on slashdot in 2008 (http://led-artwork.com) to this one, and I can assure you that the time investment is well worth it in quality. These things are good enough to compete with CK light fixtures (although I still need to finish my DMX -> OSC converter, I'm kind of totally out of money at the moment though).

      Most of the cost issue is that in small quantities *any* machining is expensive. Just having the 8 holes drilled and tapped into the aluminum piping was $17, for instance. If I was casting 1000 cases, and hiring FoxConn employees to assemble them, and not paying the software or hardware developers anything for their time, sure maybe the price could get down to $300, but $150 is crazy. The raw parts for the wifi module are $60 alone, not including any case whatsoever, nor the included arduino, nor the power supply, and so on.

      Also, Wramsdel is completely correct that I have to license patents from CK/Philips to sell these, and although the agreement is confidential, the amount is not trivial (and took lawyer time and my time to make happen). Additionally, I am trying to sell these to clubs as well so that I can offer cheaper versions to hobbyists (see below for how to get them cheaper). They are comparable to CK fixtures of similar price and brightness, are easier to install and use, and have free software to make them actually do things, as opposed to spending another $3k on control hardware and software.

      In any case, my goal with this is to get the price down to the point where I would happily buy lots of them. Since I'm poor, the only way I can do that is to get orders for enough of them that I can drop the price. Suggesting, however, that the price should be the cost of the components alone is unreasonable for any sane business. I want to be able to do this for a living and as a community service, not as a community service alone.

      In any case, since I want to get this off the ground so I can drop the price, I will point out a few things that you can do to drop the price.

      1. Buy the kit and build it yourself. My time is valuable (believe it or not), and I happily designed the product offering to be such that you could buy *everything* that you need to build your own, minus a screwdriver, for $680. I have a (hard) day job, and I'll pay top dollar for your time in doing it yourself.
      2. Use our hacker coupon code - hobb123. 5% discount. More than that I can't really support right now, since I need to get about $30k in order to build a full run of 100 lights.
      3. If you're really strapped for cash, buy the bare boards, and use the bills of materials which I *made fully downloadable from the site*, upload those to digikey, and source your own parts. Use the instructions I wrote for how to lay down the solder paste, place the components, and trivially reflow solder them on a hot plate. You won't have a case, but it sounds like you can surely manufacture your own, buy a power supply, and buy an arduino or whatever control board you like for $50. Go for it. If you just want raw component costs, excluding arduino and power supply and case, you can probably do it for $200 ($33 each special) or maybe even under $150 if you build a lot of them. Even better, you can put on your own colors of LEDs! I used red, green, and royal blue... you cou
    2. Re:$800 ?! by Gibbs-Duhem · · Score: 2, 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 =)

  8. New dog, old tricks by Sarten-X · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's it? When I read "high powered", I was expecting switching 500-amp supplies to banks of flood lights. I wasn't expecting... this.

    This is the same stuff that hobbyists and others have been doing for years. Their lights also perform outdoors, in occasional high winds, at extreme temperatures. The only thing that MIGHT be interesting here is the music analysis program, if it's capable of picking up actual musical qualities, rather than just levels of noise.

    --
    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  9. I've been working on something similar... by allanw · · Score: 3, Informative

    Shamelessly linking my own blog here:

    http://electronoblog.allanw.org/2010/10/triple-high-brightness-led-driver-arduino-shield/

    The board is in Arduino shield form factor and it can drive RGB 700mA LED's of any voltage up to 30V. It has an onboard micro that communicates with I2C that allows you to dim the channels without having to do the PWM on the host micro. This is optional, and there will be cheaper versions that just takes in PWM input signals directly.

    It seems like all these high power LED stuff is way overpriced. I designed this after seeing Sparkfun selling a similar board for $50! And now this, which costs at least $290 for a bare board.

    I haven't gotten around to finishing it yet but I intend to sell these boards for only $25 for the basic feature version.

  10. Arduino? Yawn. by Bassman59 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm so tired of non-engineers puffing up the lame Arduino platform. Why bother with Arduino when you can get a Silicon Labs 8051 board, with an excellent USB JTAG dongle, for a hundred bucks? You can't buy the debugger for the AVR for that.