Hey everyone, I'm posting here to get some ideas about this LED Moving Head Projector I've been making for about 2 years. It's all open-source (AGPLv3)

The idea was to recreate those projectors that make powerful light beams but at home as I'm a fan of lightshows like in the concerts (like Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 show). The idea was to use a LED with two servos (SG90/MG90D like) and control them via PWM with an ESP32 and a 3D printed body.

I thought it would take at most a few months to finish (as I do it in my free time), in fact it would take me 2 years.

Power:
The first problem was the power supply, I couldn't use the simple usb port as the servos would use all of the energy, making the esp32 brown-out. I mitigated this by doing 3 things.
- using a 5V 3A dedicated power supply
- 3x470uF capacitors(2 on 5V, 1 on 3.3V) to help with the current surges from the servos moving
- pull-down resistors on PWM gpio for LEDs as when the esp32 powers up, it would sometimes lead to one channel failing.
All of this fixed the issue.

LED Driver:
The second difficulty I encountered was the light itself, I used a standard 10mm LED which was not powerful at all and thus could be driven by a simple low-side MOSFET circuit. So I decided create my own high-efficiency LED driver using a PCB and the TPS92512 IC by TI, a buck constant current driver. The light would be concentrated by a collimator lens (need to be changed). I wanted to control a 3W RGB led but I also wanted to upgrade later to 9W, so I chose that IC because output current can be adjusted using the IADJ pin to set for example max 300mA and in hybrid mode with PWM input so using a trimpot for a voltage divider it can control any current from ~300mA to 1.5A. I then had to order and solder everything with a hotplate, everything was working fine until I accidentally injected reverse voltage, killing the ICs. At this point, I was kind of bored of this project and left it during half a year, then I bought a hot air station and had to sacrifice like 5-7 ICs to finally get all 3 boards working reliably.

Mechanics:
At this point the only thing missing was a good model, so I remade the original one in FreeCAD instead of fusion 360 (mainly because I switched to linux) but also to make it easier to share it with people as the whole project is on github.

Firmware:
I then wrote firmware for it originally using WebSockets but it wasn't very fast so i switched to UDP with smaller packets for better latency and ~30 updates/s. I also included OTA updates as the esp32 wasnt connected via serial anymore.

Software:
In parallel of all of this I was also writing a software to control it, it uses the sound of your speakers and detects beats to create live lightshows without any configuration, it uses a percentile based algorithm and random animations (Square, Circle, Lemniscate, etc...). It uses PySide6 and pyqtgraph for sound visualization. I also had a Novation Launchpad X so I wrote a manual mode, where you give beats, choose colors animations etc... and a hybrid mode which takes beats from the detection but lets you choose animation and color.

And here we are, the project is far from perfect but it's the first practical prototype that really works.

Current Problems:

- MG90D and SG90 are really noisy, do you have any replacement idea that are still as compact, affordable and simple ?

- Colors don't really mix well, the beam isn't focused very well.

- You guys are professional and I'm just a dumb DIYer, you certainly have a list of common mistakes I've made, tell me so I can correct them!

Roadmap:

- Project mode for software: prepare lightshows with additive colors, preset beats etc...
- Better PCB, remade in KiCAD.
- Even faster protocol, using binary or protobufs for better performance,

AI Policy:

LLMs have only been used as consultation, as a tool instead of doing all of the work, this is a human project.

https://reddit.com/link/1xg9s57/video/hxk2bshrpvxh1/player

Links:
Video
Controller Software (Windows portable and installer, Linux portable and AppImage)
ESP32 Firmware, 3D model project files, PCB project files
Printables 3D Stl
Final PCB + Circuit img

We're renovating one of our venue stages, and we made sure we wanted top notch gear.

May I present, the Mac Encore Two.

We got them delivered last week, but I haven't had time to play with it until today

What is your opinion on the Chauvet Maverick Silens 1x Profile? My theatre is considering getting some, but would enjoy your review.

There’s obviously the pit-falls of Chinese knockoffs. Loud, inconsistent color, etc.

Has anyone actually found any cheaper fixtures that are worth it? I only asking because I saw a guy on instagram using some ADJ Jolt knock-offs that actually looked good.

I know this is a cringe question but there has to be diamond in the sack of crap somewhere.

I got my LED 500 smoke machine to add fog like effects to my videos just one additional thing that I've added to my collection of gear as I get gear in I will post it on my Instagram and my other social media platform to let my fans know that my studio is slowly building but it's coming along I will introduce smoke lights and camera in my next videos and take it to a different approach more of a concert feel. With new remixes and new songs with the new sound and speaker amp sound system stay tuned.

Visco 242

I'm planning to buy a laptop primarily for lighting design and visualization, and I'm deciding between these two ASUS laptops.

My main use cases are:

- Capture for lighting previsualization, with projects containing around 200–300 fixtures.

- grandMA3 onPC, including using MA USB DMX hardware.

- Blender for 3D modelling and rendering.

- Adobe Creative Suite, particularly Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

I also need to take the laptop to venues and show clients their lighting setups, so portability is important.

Option 1: ASUS ROG Strix G16 (G614PR-RV032WS)

- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX, 16 cores / 32 threads, up to 5.3GHz

- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, 12GB GDDR7, up to 140W

- RAM: 16GB DDR5-5200, upgradeable to 64GB

- Storage: 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD

- Display: 16-inch IPS, 1920 × 1200, 165Hz, 300 nits

- Ports: USB-A, USB-C/USB4, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet and audio

- Weight: Approximately 2.5kg

- Price: Around ₹2.3–2.8 lakh, depending on retailer and availability. I'd upgrade the RAM to 32GB immediately.

Option 2: ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (GZ302EA-RU520WS, 32GB)

- CPU: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 16 cores / 32 threads, up to 5.1GHz

- GPU: Integrated AMD Radeon 8060S

- RAM: 32GB LPDDR5X-8000, soldered and not upgradeable

- Storage: 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD

- Display: 13.4-inch touchscreen, 2560 × 1600, 180Hz, 500 nits, 100% DCI-P3

- Ports: USB-A, 2 × USB4, HDMI 2.1, microSD and audio

- Battery: 70Wh

- Weight: Approximately 1.2kg without keyboard

- Price: Around ₹2.4 lakh

My questions

1. Is the RTX 5070 Ti overkill for Capture projects with around 200–300 fixtures, or would an RTX 5060 laptop be sufficient?

2. How does the Radeon 8060S perform in Capture compared with an RTX 5070 Ti in actual projects?

3. Can the Flow Z13 comfortably run Capture and grandMA3 onPC simultaneously with 32GB RAM?

4. For Blender, how significant is the advantage of NVIDIA CUDA/OptiX over the Radeon 8060S?

5. Would you recommend a different laptop under ₹3 lakh in India that offers a better balance of performance, portability and reliability?

I'd particularly appreciate feedback from people who use Capture, grandMA3, or other professional lighting and visualization software. Real-world experience is more useful to me than gaming benchmarks alone.

Thanks!

Building a rack to run 8x custom 3 m pixel neon flex tubes for an outdoor festival stage (under a roof, but it's a bush site). I'm stuck on the connector between the rack and the tubes.

Voltage drop kills DMX cable straight away (0.22 mm² over 15 m leaves almost nothing at the tube). On 2.5 mm² I'm looking at ~1 V drop, which I can live with.

Current plan is NL4 on 4 x 2.5 mm² speaker cable:

- 1+ / 1- = V+ / V-

- 2+ = data

- 2- = backup data

The appeal is that the audio vendor already carries plenty of NL4 cable, so I don't have to build a packer.

Questions

1. Anyone running pixel over Speakon? How have you dealt with the risk of someone patching an amp output into it (or the rack into a speaker)? Is colour-coding and labelling enough on a shared site?

2. Single-ended pixel data over 15 m of unshielded speaker cable: has it been reliable for you, or should I be putting a differential receiver at the tube end?

3. Is there a better connector for this I'm missing? I've ruled out 3-pin XLR (cable too thin, plus the risk of putting 12 V into someone's DMX port) and 4-pin XLR (cable's hard to source and too thin anyway).

Cheers

Hi! I’m new to this, so forgive me. But, I have a pair of moving head beams Mingjie MJ-OS-17. Everything mostly works except I can’t get them to not show a gobo. I can make it rotate, change colors, move, etc….but I can’t get it to go blank. I’m using lightkey (I think the issue is somewhere there because in “sound” mode I can get a blank beam). I’ll pay someone $50 to screen share and fix this for me!

Thanks

So I’m doing my first lighting “gig” in two weeks. I’m doing a high school cross country senior night and I have very few lights. I made this show because they want the senior introduction to be with “Chariots of Fire”. This is what I came up with let me know what you think and any improvements I can make. Also two things, this is my garage it’s not where I’m actually doing the lights and when the beam lights come on they are pointing at where the seniors come in. Sorry for the audio it’s horrible.

Recently was the LD for a local small festival of a bunch of young local rock/metal bands. They were very low budget so only had access to venue lights consisting of 2 lx bars on stage with 6 led fresnels on each then a foh stage wash bar with 6 led profiles. I am a relatively new ld and have been very spoiled with the fixtures I have had access too when normally doing live music. (Plenty of fancy moving heads and tilt strobes etc.) so to have a rig with only fresnels was a challenge for me. I was pretty happy with how it all came out but was looking for tips from the hive mind for when I’m in the same situation again.

Hope this is not out of place here.

Want to revive a smoke machine (profog) that was sitting in a cold, dark and dry basement for 10-15years.

Still has half a tank of fluid that does smell ok.

Can I just plug it in and go?

Or are there any cleaning and purging steps I should perform before connecting the machine to power?

Don’t want to destroy the machine.
Thanks for your advice and help.

im currently trying to put together a lighting rig for rave at a friend's house. im comfortable with CAD, fabrication, and technical projects so modeling my layout is the easy part, but im very new to DMX lighting control and show programming. ive been to many raves my self so i have a good idea of what a good lighting production looks like.

my current plan is:

• 4 DMX moving heads
• 2 DMX controlled lasers
• 2 led moving light bars / beam fixtures
• A custom LED display using novastar hardware and receiving cards
• a windows laptop running QLC+ to coordinate the lighting

im considering an artnet to dmx interface with four physical DMX outputs. ideally, id separate the moving heads, LED fixtures, and lasers onto different outputs, while handling the custom LED display through a separate video output from QLC+ id assume??

what im trying to understand is:

1. is QLC+ a good choice for this setup, especially for bpm matched / timecoded effects, as i intend to have my friends set programmed to the music
2. what artnet node would you recommend for a budget conscious setup, and what specifications should i prioritize?
3. how would you approach synchronizing DMX lighting with video playback on a separate LED display?
4. are there any compatibility issues or hardware purchases i should avoid before i have the exact fixtures selected?

im expecting to spend roughly 1.6k all up for lighting, controllers and cabling... as of right now this is the said lighting im looking at.

I am looking to get a new computer and while I have posted on this subject before I now have a computer in mind and am wondering how much RAM is required.

This is one of the options but only comes in 16gb of RAM.

Dell - Plus 14" 2K 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop - AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series AI 7 350 2025 - 16GB Memory - 1TB Storage

The other one I’m looking at is the HP OmniBook 7 2 in 1 with an intel 7 core and graphics card, as well as 32 GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

This is mostly for personal practice and I am not concerned about having QLab, though I would still like to be able to run WYSIWYG or VectorWorks.

I need to create a lighting scheme for this still from a scene of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I kind of have an idea of the types of lights used and everything. One I am struggling with is Ben Stiller’s character - my professor told me that the back of him looks blue (even thought he has a shadow on his back) so there must be something lighting him with a CTB and also a flag to create that shadow effect, but I don’t quite understand how that’s being done. I also knows there’s probably a light lighting him from the front to create the effect that the hard exposure light on the table is also lighting him.

Hello, everyone, hope this type of post is allowed. I'm an AV engineer and I recently saw Phoebe Bridgers, who inspired me to take lighting more seriously. I work in a corporate environment where the extent of the lighting I'll do is plug in a few uplights.

That being said, I'd love to design some lighting sets to songs, purely just for fun. I've already picked up GrandMA3 onPC and have gotten to the point where I can start doing most of what I would like, or at least find my way there through tutorials for the time being.

My biggest issue at the moment is knowing what type of fixtures are usually used for what (not what a wash or a spot is, more like if I want a sharp laser, or one of those lights that has two moving heads in one), and knowing what a "normal" setup consists of in terms of placement and lights, and what types of "animations" shows tend to use.

I'm a big self-learner so I would happily read or watch to learn this information, I'm just wondering if there are resources for a) documenting popular fixtures, b) common lighting practices.

Thank you in advance!

I have a few older Eliminator DJ lights that put off a decent amount of heat

Has anyone ever found a way to retrofit these with LED lights to help with heat and power consumption?

Hey everyone!

Recently got my hands on two ETC source four par lights at an auction and thought I might use them in video/photography work just for fun. A friend of mine recommended I get a dimmer as to not blast the light at full capacity every time so I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for manual dimmers? It’s a jungle out there finding the right ones

Title should be 'Dappled lighting effect for actors as if they were in a wood or forest' but I don't seem to be able to change it:

I have a very limited number of LED fixtures on a very small stage for Snow White in a village hall: 3 x Chauvet p-eve 160-rgbw FOH pointing at the stage. 8 x Chauvet colorado quad zoom on 2 bars on stage.

I'm out of touch with modern ways of creating effects (very much old school from 30+ years ago), so does anyone have any suggestion for LED DMX lights for making an overlying dappled effect as if sun were coming through branches? It the sort of thing you might have done with a semi out-of-focus profile and gobo in the old days. We don't have the headroom for adding moving head lights, but there maybe money to buy additional lights, as long as they're not too big, that can be used for this sort of thing in future plays and pantos.

I’m going to school for tech theater in Seattle, any advice on things I can work on in my free time to learn new skills that can help my future career??

Also I struggle with anxiety with going into this career as a child of immigrants and growing up low income, I know I have no other passions for my future and lighting designers are really sought after in my state but anyone that’s been in my shoes know how I can soothe my anxieties?

Hello, I’m Ana from Brazil.
I own an original Huasuny Rubik-10 P10 foldable LED display, purchased directly from Huasuny in China.
Hardware:
Huasuny Rubik-10 P10 RGB
HC-103D sending controller
DBStar XMPlayer 3.1.34
MY9268 LED driver (candidate)
Original 320 × 1280 mm panels
The original receiving-card configuration was lost. The display powers on, but all LED pixels remain dark.
Does anyone own a working Rubik-10 P10 or have archived factory configuration files, electrical documentation, or experience configuring its Data Processors?
I’m specifically looking for an original RSPS/RECV file, a safe configuration export from a matching unit, or guidance from a technician familiar with this hardware.
Any free technical guidance or archived files would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Ana — Brazil