Lumos

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What does the name “Lumos” stand for?
  2. What devices does Lumos support?
  3. How is this different from other programs, such as Vixen?
  4. What platforms does Lumos run on?

Answers

  1. What does the name “Lumos™” stand for?
    It is an acronym formed from the initial letters of the Latin lumen (“light”), and the words “Orchestration” and “System”. Which is what Lumos is—a light orchestration system.
  2. What devices does Lumos support?
    Of course, we have our own Lumos family of controller hardware (a do-it-yourself open-source hardware project also hosted at this SourceForge site), which the Lumos software fully supports. Additionally, Lumos is designed for it to be reasonably easy to add device drivers for a wide variety of light controllers which accept commands via serial or parallel port from a host PC. The initial release includes a small sample set, including two different X-10* controllers (“LynX10*” and “Firecracker*”). Additionally, experimental drivers are provided for two popular DIY SSR controllers: the “Renard*” and the “Olsen 595*”. These, however, are untested as the author does not have the actual hardware available for testing and fine-tuning of the drivers. They were coded to the available protocol specifications on the Internet. We would like to add some other popular devices to the list, depending on whether we can get a sample controller to work with, or a person who has one and is willing to work with us to get a working driver tested.
  3. How is this different from other programs, such as Vixen?
    Vixen* is a very popular light orchestration program, so we'll frame our answer in terms of that program because it should be a useful point of reference. Vixen is an excellent tool, and one we continue to support and recommend to others. Lumos is an alternative which some users may find useful on platforms where Vixen can't be used. It may also be quite useful to use both programs together, letting each leverage its own strengths.

    The primary area of difference is in the supported platforms. Most light orchestration software we've encountered works on the Microsoft* Windows* platform only. Lumos was designed with the goal of running on as many different platforms as possible. It's being developed on FreeBSD*, and tested on Linux*, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X*. In theory, it should run on just about anything.

    Secondly, the way it goes about updating the light controller hardware is different. Vixen, for example, handles events as individual snapshots capturing the state of every output channel at each instant in time. A typical device plug-in would just take that data and update every channel on each controller, regardless of whether they all changed state or just a single channel did. While several SSR controllers expect to be updated that way, not all do, and individually addressing the specific channels which change can be more efficient (depending on how much is being updated at one time). Lumos handles channel events separately so the choice of whether to send complete device updates or individual channel changes can be made by each device driver as appropriate for the hardware it's driving.

    Thirdly, Lumos is completely open source and full source code is provided. We fully respect the decision of other developers to keep their code proprietary, but for those users who would like a system they can open up and customize at any level, we wanted to provide a system which made that possible.

    Finally, Lumos is a very new system, and is still somewhat spartan in “chrome plating” and user interface design. Lumos may be a wonderful choice for an experienced hobbyist who wants extra flexibility to experiment, but for a more casual user who only wants a way to get patterns of lights to blink from their Windows PC, a more mature program such as Vixen may still meet their needs better.

  4. What platforms does Lumos run on?
    Lumos has been designed from the very beginning to be as platform-independent as possible, allowing a great deal of freedom for people to use it on whatever computer hardware they have conveniently available. We feel this is a good thing in general, but particularly in this case, hobbyists don't always have the luxury of putting their biggest and best PC into service to run their holiday light displays, which may limit choice of platform as well. No special operating system or proprietary development framework is required. Just a Python interpreter, and the PySerial and PyParallel modules.

    While Lumos theoretically ought to run on just about anything, we have verified and tested it so far on the following configurations without problems:

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