Q Light Controller+

Hello, first time poster here.

I'm more of a sound guy than a lighting guy but I do understand the basics of DMX also in combination with MIDI.
So, I want to realize a relativily simple project I guess.
Three groups of RGBW strips are to constantly simulate a day/night-cycle in an exhibition room. This is probably best realized with a chaiser?
In addition to that I need to install two hardware buttons. 1 for AllOn (during maintanence of the room) and one for Blackout (for during closing hours).
Does QLC+ support Overlays like normal lighting consoles? Or would I need a third hardware button to reactivate the chaiser after a AllOn or Blackout?

This will be a fixed installation for years to come, probably without any much change made to it.

Since this is so simple I thought about using an Arduino Leonardo as a "hardware button to MIDI" interface which is connected via USB to a Pi 3 B with a Bitwizard DMX interface.
The Arduino will be programmed using the MIDIUSB library and the MIDI_controller package
Has anyone tried this before?
Will the Arduino automatically be registered as a MIDI In device by QLC+ on the Pi? And will it stay so on the same COM in case the Arduino and or the Pi are taken off electricity/rebooted?

Money is not really the reason I'm going this DIY-route. I'd rather like the installation to be as simple as possible.

Thank you.

PI has its own GPIO interface, you don't need arduino for buttons. QLC+ has GPIO plugin on PI.

If you want something simple, and you can program, you may want to check python API for olad and do without QLC+.

• https://www.openlighting.org/ola/tutori ... pberry-pi/
• https://www.openlighting.org/ola/apis/
• https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... /README.md

Thank you.
I read about the GPIO plugin on this forum before I asked the question.
Unfortunately the documentation and the threads seem pretty limited in actual info and I was under the impression that the GPIOs can only be used as DMX inputs per DMX-channels? Is that not the case?
I have some projects up and running with GPIOs triggering OMX player to play sound or video. But I used existing code to do this. I learned about python and stuff, cron etc. by doing so.

Unfortunately I'm not too good at programming so I don't have a deeper understanding of APIs.

So, assuming I can use the GPIO plugin to directly call a chaiser or a scene in QLC+ on the PI using a DigitalWrite=High,
do I need to have a python script before via cron to check on the GPIOs?

I'm sorry, pretty noob questions I guess.

I haven't played with GPIO, nevertheless: QLC+ kind of converts everything to DMX and then works with that. DMX is used for input from other lighting consoles, for output to lights, and for external control of virtual console.

You need to patch GPIO to a universe (not used for anything else) and assign external controls to that universe, similar to how you do with MIDI.


API is just a complicated name for a library that interfaces something

This is your skeleton: https://www.openlighting.org/ola/develo ... ple_Frames
You just need to replace the part that starts with # compute frame here with your code, depending on whether it's day/night/full on/blackout.