Lumos: Light Orchestration System

Project Status and News Updates

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.

Released 0.6.1 to fix a couple of bugs in 0.6a1 and make a throughput improvement for lplay.

Most of the work lately has been concentrated on the firmware and support for the Lumos controller hardware. The 0.6 release includes code checked into the main lumos framework during this development. Now we're looking back to the main project again to push that along farther.

Work has begun on the GUI interface, starting with the configuration profile editor. It graphically represents the components of the show including communication networks, power sources, and controllers, with the details of their configuration available in a series of pop-up dialogs. Once this is finished, we'll be working to expand the GUI to a sequence editor as well.

A few changes to the file format for configurations have resulted from this:

• The field power is now called power_source
• The gfci field is no longer used. Lumos was not really using it for anything other than a note to yourself anyway, and it's not really the business of the sequencing software.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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).