BlinderKitten: Free lighting software | Hacker News Reader

BlinderKitten: Free lighting software

blinderkitten.lighting

111 pointsgdtfmaster25 comments

Would love if the landing page had some screenshots, or if there were something in the navbar to link to a demo video. Looks cool though!

I have no connection to the project, but in the navbar is a link to their YT page.

Sample video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AFV0ez8TPQ

BlinderKitten is built on top of JUCE framework, with the OrganicUI.

There are several open source DMX lighting consoles for desktop, this one seems particularly nice and with fresh controlling paradigm ideas.

Can you link to those other projects?

Sure.

The device definitions come as GDTF files, see the spec and other projects that utilize GDTF here [1]

Juce framework [2]

OrganicUI [3]

[1] https://gdtf.eu/docs/list-of-projects/

[2] https://juce.com/

[3] https://github.com/benkuper/juce_organicui/

Is there a linter/checker for this file format?

There are xsd and schematron schemas [1], see docs generated from the xsd [2]. The GDTF editor on https://gdtf-share.com [3] also has deeper internal validation some of the data logic.

[1] https://github.com/mvrdevelopment/spec

[2] https://gdtf.eu/gdtf/xsd/xsd/

[3] https://gdtf-share.com/

https://www.qlcplus.org

No SSL certificate on the site, so here's the GitHub repo: https://github.com/norbertrostaing/BlinderKitten/

Hmmm, I wonder what the license is for this.

GPLv3 https://github.com/norbertrostaing/BlinderKitten/blob/main/L...

That wasn't there before.

This is like QLab [0], right? If so, it's fantastic to see an open-source solution pop up in this space. That was very fun software to play around in when I was using it for an immersive tabletop roleplaying game I ran. Is the goal to focus exclusively on lighting control, or will other types of effects (sounds, video, HTTP) be included eventually as well?

[0] https://qlab.app/

This is more of a lighting controller while QLab is a show controller. These are typically viewed as different layers of the stack: a show control system controls the light control system.

I don't know much about BlindersKitten but the page says it can receive OSC. OSC was originally for sound applications but is common as a show control protocol today due to being fairly simple and open (much like MIDI-SC, a formerly common show control protocol based on MIDI). So conceptually OSC is likely how a show control system would send commands (cues) to BlindersKitten.

One such free OSC software you could use to control it (+ handle sound, video, etc as asked in GP) is https://ossia.io :) (transparency report: i'm the dev)

I'm not seeing any open source license in the repo, so this is more "public source" than open source. You can't modify and redistribute the code for eg.

Looks like it might also be GPL violating, some of the external deps included in the repo are copyleft.

Looks like a PR adding a GPL 3.0 license was just merged: https://github.com/norbertrostaing/BlinderKitten/pull/1

If you have never used QLab, I recommend downloading it and tinkering for a little while. It is probably the best-designed native macOS app that I’ve ever come across, finely tuned by a handful of developers for something like 15 years. It’s a great reminder of what apps _could_ feel like.

Thanks for the sharing and your comments You can view interface of the software with the youtube channel I've updated the license with your comments and also the linux logo :)

Does anyone else find it a little strange that the logo for Ubuntu is used in the download section against the Linux version, instead of Tux?

I don't. And I cannot see their stats, but I can imagine those clearly show that their Linux users almost exclusively run Ubuntu. And if that's the case, why not lean into it?

Screenshot?

Very cool!

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