Danny's Moving Lights
Being a self-funded community venue, we do not have sufficient funds to enable us to purchase a commerically produced intelligent lighting system. So, to make things more interesting, I thought I would design and build my own. As I designed and built the lighting desk myself, it is easy enough to expand to send data to the stage for controlling other equipment.
My inital design enabled me only to pan and tilt simple lamps, such as par cans, the prototype of which is still in use in the main auditorium. This lamp has proved its worth. Over the past three years it has been used as followspot, and fills in bits that I'd forgotten to focus (!), and various effects. Although only pan and tilt is operational on this prototype, I built the desk and interface with the ability to transmit up to 8 blocks of 8 bits of data, providing pan position, tilt position, pan speed, tilt speed, colour change and gobo selection, with data blocks spare for future projects.
The control module on the desk at present only provides manual live operation of the lamps but I am now designing and developing a new module to take its place. This will enable me to record single or multiple sequences to move lamps individually and in groups, and will be able to recall positional information from the main memory during lighting cues.
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At the stage end, the data to each lamp is processed and stored on one PCB, pictured left. The data is the main clock from the desk, one sinchronization pulse for each channel scanned and 8 blocks of 8 bits of data sent during the time the channel is scanned for. The data to the lamps can be daisy chained from one lamp to another, therefore reducing the amount of cabling required. All data connections are made via 25 way D-type connectors and each lamp's identification channel is set using three thumb-wheel switches on each lamp, this enables the lamp to be identified and data accepted over 0 to 256 channels. |
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A design for the new moving light module, though this is continually changing and is probably not how the final module will look. |
Details of my moving lights are not available as a constructional project as they will only interface with my desk.