XLights – open source light sequencer and show scheduler | Hacker News Reader

XLights – open source light sequencer and show scheduler

xlights.org

89 pointsdanboarder16 comments

Strong recommendation for Xlights, I used to program patterns for my dreamcoat.

I started with a 3D scan of me wearing the costume using my wife's iPhone when the first version with LIDAR came out. After cleaning up the scan (iPhone 12 LIDAR wasn't the best quality) in Blender, I spent a good many hours in Xlights placing every single light at its correct 3D position using the imported mesh as a reference. Laborious work, but with all 1300-odd WS2811 LEDs mapped in all 3 axes, it makes for a pretty beautiful product.

Using Xlights is great. For open source it's pretty smooth. There's a small learning curve for the technology, but making sequences a strong resemblance to video editing. The project has frequest updates, I haven't seen any project-breaking format changes in the 3.5 years I've used it, and it's clearly maintained by people who use it. Push new rendered sequences to my FPP-running raspi on the costume through wifi then editing the running playlist through a web interface on FPP on the laptop is a dream.

If anyone's curious:

FPP: https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp

My dreamcoat sequenced to Holst's Jupiter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzdUJsAMa4&pp=ygUNbGVkIGRyZ...

Timelapses of me making the costume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PODWVIsqwwA&pp=ygUNbGVkIGRyZ...

What's Xlights? I found the website and your recommendation inspiring, but at the same I have no idea what this thing actually is...

Sorry if this is too verbose, but here's my attempt:

XLights is nearly a one-stop-shop for your programmable LED lights. You map channels in the data streams you send to lights (handles many different data types), organize (for instance placing them in groups like left-arm in my case) and qualify them however you want (x,y,z position, etc.), and create "sequences" which are mappings in time of different pre-designed patterns to your previously configured model (for instance, a bar of light going left to right, a wavy undulating rainbow wave, etc.).

With all that setup, you can render (compile to whatever data format the predetermined sequence of lights) you can play back on whatever device controls your lights.

The DIY Lighting community is quite impressive. Last year 938 displays in 27 countries participated in a project called https://xlightsaroundtheworld.com/ where we all play the same song and sequence and a montage is created. https://xlightsaroundtheworld.com/category/all-projects/

I used to run a fairly good-sized light show, until it became too much work (job change, kids/family, etc.) xlights powered my shows and taught me a lot about the protocols and hardware and everything else that comes with it. It's amazingly good software with input from a lot of talented individuals.

Pretty much everyone running a Christmas light show on their house is sequencing it with this, and playing it back on a raspberry pi or beaglebone black, sending signals to a bunch of ESP32s to control their lights.

And many of them buy their “shows” rather than sequencing their own with XLights.

I've not done home christmas lights, but have done some DIY lighting and I really liked the DMXKing devices. They are full-on XLR DMX light controllers, but they are controlled by USB so it's possible to just code them using JavaScript or Python or whatever. Just write commands to USB and you can control 1 or 2 DMX universes per device.

Source code: https://github.com/smeighan/xlights

I did a few things with xLights and it's a ton of work to do well.

I've been wondering if with models such as AudioCraft from Meta, if we're getting to a point where sequencing with xLights could be automated?

Neat! I recently stumbled upon the docs that support DMX in Unreal Engine 5 as well: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/dmx-previs-sample-pr...

Seems very cool and also supports importing devices from GDTF!

Wake me up when it can do precise 400led 2D mapping under 10seconds and even not be picky about ambient lighting conditions at all like Twinky.

What is the point of posts like this?

What’s stopping you from putting in the effort into an open source system so it can compete with a feature set of a closed source commercial product?

I completely agree. Whether grandparent meant it or not, that language gives an entitled vibe which doesn't fit for open source projects.

I'm super curious about this. I recently tried a one day install with twinkly on a boat and the LEDs were too far away and moving too much to map with my phone. I was thinking about how I would do it differently, maybe with some manual work. Do you know any exciting open source work in the space?

So much this. It seems to detect any bright spots as LEDs. It should make a difference of the current frame with all-leds-off frame and then detect the LEDs.

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