Do you know anything about Arduino stuff?

No, actually not. Yeah the most promising start, a teacher looking worried at you because you are new and you don’t know anything about Arduino. Wel not that it matters now because I have learned myself the basics in no time and started working with the DMX extension. It’s really cool actually. As already mentioned the DMX is a communications protocol mostly used to control stage lighting.

We got ourselves the necessary gear to create some small projects. The gear we used was a DMX extension plate that could be mounted onto the Arduino board. A small “slave” capable of decoding the DMX signal and sending out 8 of the 512 channels at a time. (The slave had jumpers to select the 8 channels you wanted as output).

So the first assignments was reliably easy, we got example code and had to run it on the board, make some adjustments and test it again. All easy if you had the hang of the DMX system. We developed the assignments further with loops creating patterns (woh if that isn't Semcity like, a project from during the ACD classes) and with a piezo element. The piezo element we used to recreate the famous Knight Rider. Every time the Piezo element got “stressed” (with good ones it could work with voice vibrations) the light moved up one signal. We extended it by making it fade out and fade in when the lights changed.

It took us a while but we found out by "hard" learning that all our calculations stressed out our bitrate. So it became unreadable for the slave element steering the LEDs. So we had to rewrite our code a bit making first the calculations, storing them in an array and than reading out the array in a direct loop towards the creation of a proper sequenced bitrate signal.

Today with only the Arduino board here in my dorm I have created some small code that creates a random Christmas light sequence. If that isn't cool!

Pictures coming online very soon!