Lumos is a project to create an open-source, platform-neutral system 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. The project includes both hardware controllers as well as a software framework which drives the Lumos hardware controllers as well as other popular DIY controllers.
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The source code for the Lumos application, control board hardware designs, and firmware is now hosted at github. Future development is taking place there.[6-Jul-2022]
Sigh.[30-Dec-2019]
Yeah, the reality of "spare time" and "labor of love" projects is that they don't get all the attention they ought to get. Lumos isn't dead, though, and has been getting some internal updates over the years but nothing I felt was worth releasing to the world but I'm going to work on getting something moving here shortly, so here's hoping...
It's already been updated to Python3 and some more work done with respect to taking inputs from sensors that may be in place for a show, but I'd like to have the graphical sequence editor done next. I'm also considering a higher-performance playback tool, but that will require porting Lumos to something other than Python, but I've been considering that anyway...
Stay tuned.
[16-Sep-2017]The best-laid plans indeed...
Such are the perils of spare-time hobby projects. I'm still alive and so is Lumos. I plan to push this closer to a complete state in the first half of 2020, so stay tuned.
[10-May-2014]The best-laid plans...
Real life interfered with my Christmas Light hobby for the last few years and forced me to get sidetracked a bit on completing the Lumos sequence editor and some improvements I have meant to make to the hardware. However, I'm looking at this again to see what I can reasonably accomplish for the 2017 season.
[30-Mar-2014]Working on the 1.0 release. So far an additional abstraction layer has been added to separate the presentation of controlled objects as the user sees them (in the sequence editor, sequence files, etc.) from the hardware arrangement of physical power channels and controllers. Now higher-level complex objects such as RGB devices can be addressed for what they are (by selecting a color for them to light up in rather than messing with individual red, green, and blue levels), and the sequencer doesn't need to know any specifics about the hardware involved. The older file formats will be recognized and upgraded on the fly when read in.
Work continues on the sequence editor.
Updated documentation for the hardware controllers, introduced the 4-channel DC controller (still working on the experimental prototype but the documentation is posted, with more technical details to follow). This is a scaled-down version of the 24-channel DC controller.