Slightly crazy screen

This is a place for sharing with the community the results you achieved with QLC+, as a sort of use case collection.
You can share photos, videos, personal hardware/software projects, interesting HOWTO that might help other users to achieve great results.
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cyclooctane
Posts: 5
Joined: Sun Feb 25, 2018 12:11 am
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I just completed a week long worship conference at my local church using a custom built LED screen out of WS2812 LED's
The screen was 152x64 pixels (designed for 160x64 but it would not fit in the location it needed to go in) and QLC drove both the screen (video things included), and the rest of the lighting rig.
If anyone wants any extra details on the screen construction, I am happy to do a more detailed write up in the future when things have calmed down a little.

The main lighting rig is controlled by a pair of USB to DMX interfaces (ENTTEC DMX USB Pro Mk2)
The screen (as designed, not as deployed, as deployed it was 8 pixels shorter) consists of 6 raspberry pi's running OLA and fcserver, each controlling 2 or 4 fade candy boards.
Each fade candy controls 8 strips, each 64 pixels long (the height of the screen) 20 sets of 8 (designed) gives the 160 px across.

Each Raspberry pi ingested up to 16 DMX universes over E1.31 and outputted via open pixel control to fcserver, that then mapped onto the fadecandy.
Each fadecandy controlling 512 pixels and using 1536 DMX channels. spread out over 4 DMX universes. (cause it was easier to set up QLC up to use 384 channels per universe cause each strip was 64px long, so 192ch per strip, and 2 strips per universe) Total designed DMX channel count for the screen was 30720

The rest of the rig took another 400 or so channels

The method I used for making QLC play video was weird but it worked.
It was to take advantage of the "animation" option for displaying images on an RGB matrix.
By exporting a video as a series of PNG images, then using imagemagick to stitch all the images together to form a really wide PNG file.
QLC was then fed the resulting PNG file and set to "animation" mode on the RGB matrix function with a hold time of 40ms (to get 25fps)
Crazy but it worked.

Thank you Massimo for this amazing and very flexible bit of software.
It is an absolutely central part of the lighting rig that I use.

Also, a second thank you for the multi-thread work in 4.12 because with out that, this setup would not have been possible due to the single thread CPU needs.
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Regards

siegmund
Posts: 703
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2015 11:03 am
Location: Germany
Real Name: Lukas

Amazing! I'd love to hear some details about how you built the screen and realized QLC driving all those pixels 8-)
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mcallegari
Posts: 4720
Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2015 9:09 am
Location: Italy
Real Name: Massimo Callegari
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Nice!
btw, 4.12 supports animated GIFs, so I guess there was no need to do the weird PNG workaround
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GGGss
Posts: 3052
Joined: Mon Sep 12, 2016 7:15 pm
Location: Belgium
Real Name: Fredje Gallon

Nice work...
And the trick with animation does inspire me doing something crazy too... The possibility controlling the frame rate LIVE is very appealing ;-)

How did your network looked like? Any idea if it chocked on the load?
All electric machines work on smoke... when the smoke escapes... they don't work anymore
murf
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Sep 12, 2018 9:46 pm
Real Name: marvin

That looks great!

So it's just Artnet to DMX i suggest?

Wich pixelcontrollers did you guys use?
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GGGss
Posts: 3052
Joined: Mon Sep 12, 2016 7:15 pm
Location: Belgium
Real Name: Fredje Gallon

All electric machines work on smoke... when the smoke escapes... they don't work anymore
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