Lumos is a project to create an open-source, platform-neutral program for controlling light displays from a PC. This is often done, for example, to make interesting Christmas light displays, possibly synchronized to a sound track.
Lumos is a work in progress. Currently (version 0.5), there is basic sequencing functionality, where sequences of light effects can be replayed, timed to certain times of day, and synchronized to music using a PC running Linux or Windows (most of the code should work on a Mac as well, but there may be issues with some of the device control and currently is not tested or supported.
The first draft of the Lumos User's Guide is available here. [PDF]
The current version of Lumos may be obtained here.
[4-Dec-2011]Release 0.5 is out. I won't consider Lumos to be at version 1.0 until it has its own GUI sequence editor, but the playback tools are working fine now. This is the code I used to run my own Christmas lights last December.
[17-Nov-2011]Release 0.5a1 is out. Several bug fixes and new features are now supported (see release notes and the updated documentation). This should be the final release for the Christmas 2011 season.
[18-Jan-2011]I didn't get the time to work on this over the summer that I was hoping to have, but I have added a small experimental change which allows the player to include an audio track with the light sequence.
I tried this for Halloween, and it seemed to work ok. Gearing up now to use it for Christmas this year. I'll release a version with this change as soon as that looks stable after more testing.
Unfortunately, a sequence editor is still on the future wish list, although the player works well if you already have a sequence editor (e.g., Vixen) but need to play back your sequence on a non-Windows system or on unsupported SSR hardware (both of which are the situations I'm facing personally).
[13-Dec-2009]Getting this project back into an active state for 2010–2011.
I tried a few minor new features for my own 2010 Christmas light display which helped me see where I want to go with their final form. Once the busy time in Jan-Feb calms down, I'll spend the late spring and early summer putting together the 1.0 release or at least a beta which is more feature complete than we have today.
My current wish list for 2011 development of Lumos:
- GUI show configuration editor tool
- GUI “workbench” program for scene editing
- Support for playback of audio in sync with display
[04-Jan-2009]Development on Lumos didn't happen as planned during 2009 due to some other time conflicts, but hopefully after the holiday season things will pick back up here and we'll get the rest of the features we want to have in place for the 1.0 release.
As of right now, a copy of Lumos 0.3a2 is running a small Christmas light display (48 channels on a custom SSR board and about 15,000 lights). The part of this that's worth noting is that for the first time it's not running on a Linux box. I had a Windows 7 system available to run the show, so tried that as an experiment. Lumos installed without a hitch and other than renaming the command-line utilities to have a ".py" extension so Windows would know what to do with them, no changes were required to Lumos to run on that platform at all.
Lumos 0.3a2 released. Minor bug fix in lcheck, and added a user manual.
[30-Dec-2008]
Lumos 0.3a1 is available for download. This is still alpha code, not yet finished, but it is functional as far as byte-at-a-time serial devices go. Many more features are yet to be added, but Lumos can be experimented with in the mean time (as I type this, it is, in fact, running my Christmas lights on my front lawn). Support for the other 3 standard interfaces (parallel byte- and bit-at-a-time, and serial bit-at-a-time) is not yet implemented, and most of the device drivers are untested (owing, for the most part, to my not having the hardware in question to test against).