hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1414.txt

Episode: 1414
Title: HPR1414: ohmroep hpr live 4, 31-06-2013, operating lights at Observe Hack Make
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1414/hpr1414.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 01:08:33

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Hello, this is Nidomedia reporting for Hacker Public Radio Live at the OM Group on 104.7 FM.
With me today is Dimitri, also known as Hobby Pop and he's the team lead of the Light
Operations Centre.
Dimitri, nice to meet you.
Hello, nice to be here.
Thanks for the invitation.
Okay, well, why don't you tell us a bit about who you are first?
Let's begin with yourself.
Okay, my name is Dimitri Motomam and also known as Hobby Pop.
I'm a member of the Hacker Space Bidler in MS4 in the Netherlands and I'm also the Secretary.
So basically I'm interested in the making things within the Hacker scene.
So, soldering, I do e-nose, lasers, lights, LEDs.
Everything that makes a color and it's nice, then I'm interested.
Okay, and how did you get involved in the Light's team here?
Okay, I was already for a long time in the Hacker Space scene in the Netherlands and I know
Coon, GMC, and we did the intro for the when the Hacker Space opened.
I did a laser show and a lot of people were invited from there when I was invited to
Coon to CCG to do CCG Camp 2011, to the laser show in there and Fienafuert, which was
a really nice experience and my introduction to the Hacker Camps, which I totally love.
And then after that, when we organized OEM, they asked me to be the team leader of the Light
Operations Center and to build some cool shit.
Okay, well, we have like 12 hectares of space here and so you basically, you are the one
responsible for all the lights that are blinking and switching and...
Yes, that's correct around here.
We have 12 hectares of land and when we started, the first question that came to mind was,
do we rent stuff or do we buy stuff to make stuff ourselves?
And in the true Hacker spirit, we just decided to make effort in ourselves, except for
the smoke machines.
It crossed our minds, it crossed our minds for a few seconds to build our own smoke
machines, very every once, but then we thought we'd better focus on the lights, so therefore
we did rent the smoke machines and the rest of the lights we just built ourselves.
Okay, could you tell us a bit also for the listeners who are not at the camp themselves?
Could you tell us a bit about the setup, like when you walk into the... at the entrance,
what you see?
Yeah, basically what we did is we divided all the lighting in four groups.
We have LED pixels, which are wrapped around the BVC cube, which is placed on a four-meter
high pole, which is across all the paths, the walking paths, the fire lanes on the fields.
Next to that, we have strips across the road.
When you enter the main entrance, it's a 500 meter long entrance road and if you walk
there every 16 meters, there's a 5 meter strip across the road and we can address each pixel
individually.
We have like a big display of three and a half thousand pixels, which is 500 meters long
and we can scroll stuff around it and make nice effects.
And then the third thing we have is the bridges.
For security reasons, the organization asked us to light the bridges, so we put some really
cool, very bright LED pixels, RGB LED pixels onto the bridges and we use the same pixels
on the big home sign, which I hope will appear in lots of photos and it already has shown
up on the Dutch television, where the presenter was in front of it, this is a big home sign,
which is two and a half meters high and 10 meters wide and it says OHM 2013 and it's got
lots of pixels and also, of course, last but not least, we put all the pixels on the
bar, so it's a 400 pixel display, 8 by 50 pixels and we can scroll text on that and
have cooler text plus my effects and stuff like that.
And well, it's not only limited to lights and lights, right?
You also have the smoke machine you mentioned earlier and you also have some flame drawers.
Yes, I brought some flame drawers and basically what I did is I brought these and I already
met some people at the camp that built their own flame drawers, so I want to look into
that and probably have a big setup for the next years to come.
And then the last thing is, of course, within the show aspect is also the lasers, which
I built myself and it's the four RGB lasers, they have the power of six watts combined,
so it's 24 watts of RGB laser power and it's directed over all the parts of the field.
The field is divided in the north field and a south, west and an east field and I try
to light up all the fields at night with my lasers.
And you have succeeded in that.
Thanks so much.
All right, you also have, there's lights all over the camps which are used also for emergency
lighting, but those are the PVC pipes you talked about earlier, right?
Yeah, the sleeves have a mode that if somebody trips over the main cable going into the core,
if the centrally control system and all the lights switch on to an emergency mode,
which is basically a white light, so we always have light.
If somebody disconnects a network cable or something, the controller is programmed to
automatically go to a white setting and therefore lighting the parts, even when there is no
network connection available or problems with the data, the clover curve or whatever.
So basically defaults to a white light, so in case of emergency, when everything breaks down,
except for, of course, the power to the thing itself, then you can still see stuff and walk around.
Yeah, that's correct.
And basically one of the requirements we had when we designed the system,
which I will talk about in a few minutes, is that we have a software in place and it talks
to our own hardware. The hardware is basically divided in three controllers.
The most important one is used for the strips. It was made by Bob.
He's also a member in our hackerspace in MSWord and what he did is basically take a
ENC 28J60 board, which is basically an ethernet board. We made it our own board,
the top of it, and it's at mega between J-driven.
So people can control it themselves and basically what the controller does is take an ethernet
frame and translates it to an RGB strip output. You can talk over ethernet, you can talk
the internet packages and the internet packages decide which let the lights out.
Okay, so those are directly from the ethernet frames.
Yeah, all the calls are connected to the switches and the switches are connected to the data
globe, which is basically a port cabin mobile toilet with switches inside and from there on,
on one central location, the lock tower, the lock center, we can control all the lights on the
field. So we have one central place, that was one of our requirements, we have a central place,
we can control all the lights, put them in emergency mode, turn the police mode on, turn every
effect on. Could you tell us a bit about police mode? Yeah, we decided that it was fun,
that if the police entered the terrain, that we would welcome them, with the side they know,
and it was the blue light of the flashlights they have on the car, so we made an effect that
simulated the police flashlight and whenever they enter the terrain, we have made a connection to
the electric server, so you can dial the number, enter the secret password and then all the lights
turn blue. All right, okay, did we miss any hardware? Yes, we did, yeah, we have the really
the heart of the system is our own controllers, which I mentioned earlier, we have the controller
that Bob made, and that's a small PCB, and from the PCB that takes the ethernet frames and outputs
to that strip, there's two modes, you can set it to strips and you can set it to pixels and you can
use five auto 12 volt inputs, the controller is very cheap and it's open source, so it's a very good
news, I hope. Yes, there's even a github link for this. Yeah, that's true, you search for bobo
one on one on github, then you see LOC underscore controller, that's the controller, all the
kinetics are in there, the board files, the drill files, so you can just send it off to your
PCB manufacturer and you can have a very cheap board, I think the board is only one euro to produce
and it's like nine euros in parts, so for 10 euros you can build your own ethernet to let's
do the controller, yeah, we hope a lot of people will do that, so the development of the software
also continues. That's good news, yeah, we will put a link to this on the show note,
if after the show we need to get together and then we'll find the links and then we'll put it in
the show notes for the for the hacker public radio. Let's go next to the to the Bob controller,
we have also the controller that boss made, as a 007, he's from hack 42, he built a brilliant controller
that from an old payment terminal, but it didn't cost us really much money, it takes ethernet in
and it outputs DMX, so not let's do it, but DMX protocol. DMX is a lighting protocol. Yes, it's
used for controlling lights and it's very well known in the lighting industry, it's basically
the standard to control all the lights and then the DMX signal goes to an RGB, dimmer basically,
it's a DMX RGB dimmer, so it's a 10 channel RGB, so 30 channels in total, controllable over DMX,
so your first talk to ethernet to the small controller, which is made from the payment terminal,
which is programmed to take the DMX protocol, strip it off, and a sense prior DMX to the controller,
and then we are allowed to control 10 RGB floodlights, because on every pretend there is floodlights,
and the floodlights we can control also centrally. Okay, so that's the hardware, well apart from probably
the individual lights, but I don't think we should really go into that particularly,
I mean, who made the lead light, but you also have a software application which you use in order
to control this all in the lock tent. That's correct, this is basically two pieces of software,
we build our own software, basically the part that talks and that communicates with the hardware,
is the lock arnet proxy, that's also built by Bob, and we had some brilliant programs coming
over from England, Kevin and Kat, and they teamed up with Bob and they made the software really
amazing, and what basically the arnet proxy does is that it takes the signal from a controlling laptop,
and that can be either a self-written software or metrics, which we're so kind to sponsor us,
with the 128 universe version of their metrics software, which is very easy to create cool effects,
and although software talks to the arnet proxy, and the arnet proxy basically defies the field
up in the field, where the lighting poles are with the PVC tubes with the LED strip wrapped around them,
the bridges is a separate section, the main path, separate section, the own sign is a separate section,
and the boss is a section, so it's all split up, and we can use four or five different people
talking to different parts of the field at the same time, and the proxy just takes it all,
and sends it out, and at this moment we do roughly 35 megabits a second of the max control stuff,
or arnet packages over the whole field. We have a constant stream of 35 megabits per second
to control all the lights. Okay, and this is going over the same network as the rest of the
networking gear, or do you have a separate... No, we have a separate field, and we thought it was
a bit safer to prevent people just blocking in and controlling the lights, but we made the arnet proxy,
to give the people the chance to talk to our lights, but via the arnet proxy. So the arnet
proxy is in the separate field, and if you are allowed from the switch in the lock tent, we have access
to the lock server, and from the lock server, you talk to the lights on the field. Okay, and you
do well, you had the metrics software, but there are also people who came in and just
brought you working there, or... Yeah, that was even nicer. We had the software from the beginning
for my tricks, which were so kind to sponsor us 264 Univ vs. Dongles. Anything is they came in first
with 64 Univ vs. and we told them that was not enough. That was really funny, so they had to
get the second Dongle, because else we wouldn't be able to control all the lights on the field
with one Dongle. So they expanded our loan to controllers. The next to that, what's really funny
was, from the start on, when we turn on all the systems, people start programming effects
themselves, and they can connect you to the asterisk phone system to have phone controllable lights,
and then somebody came in, a really nice guy with the python script, and what it did basically
was make a flame, and he said, can I use this flame on your poles? So we gave him a 45 minute
introduction to the software, and then he went away, and we thought he never came back, but after
two days he came back, we plugged in the effect, and it worked, and we have now at night very beautiful
air-like candles, so that the poles look like candles, really nice lights with flame flickering,
really cool effect, to see overall the poles in the field, really impressive, and it's nice to see
that people can generate user content for this. We're also working on the bandwidth monitor,
so you can see the actual use of the bandwidth of the line, the 10 gig o'blink, so that's really
cool, and next to that we're working on our sound to input, sound to light, so we can plug into your
stream, for instance, and you stream it, and when you talk all the lights in the field work like
graphical analyzer. That's cool, that's cool. Okay, let's see, can you tell us a bit more about
the proxy system? How that works? Yeah, the proxy is basically one box in the NOG data center,
because that's next to us, and we really wanted to be close to that, and basically it takes the
input for the various sources, like the laptop or scripts or the asterisk server, shooting off
scripts on the server, and then basically on there we can map also universes, so it's very easy
to add some lights, if the lights at the entrance gate needed to be added, we just add them,
and then you can easily do a mapping, and you can say, okay, this section entrance, and if you
send something, it only goes to entrance, and it doesn't disturb the other fields, and it's very
handy, because it's like 200 universes, which we are now controlling, it's all sometimes very
hard, because the poles are sometimes 800 meters across, and then it's very hard to find where each
pole is, so we had like a system that pulls with Ardnet pole, all the systems, and then we know which
MAC addresses belong to which pole, so we have like a basically a translation on the map from
which pole is where, and which MAC address it is, so we can talk to it and group it into groups.
Okay, and the funny thing is that one of our users made a log file, so if somebody turns on the
blue light, we get on our old T-Lex, we have an old T-Lex teletype, and it prints out on the role,
it prints out who activated the blue lights, so we have a log file on paper to see what time,
somebody activated the blue light system, so it's really funny to have an old style log and
system, it's really funny. You used it in the echo space, you used it to read the Twitter
count, right? It's a Twitter T-Lex, as it's called, it's a hack for the two project, it's really
funny, you can send stuff to the Twitter T-Lex, and it comes out on paper, and you can use the
T-Lex to write messages, and they became visible on Twitter, and we just modified it a bit,
so it's really funny if you hear the machine go off, you know that the lights go on, and you can see
you turn it on, it's really funny in old fashion, old school. All right, and you also built a big tower
next to the lock tent. Yeah, that's correct, the high tower on the field is the lock tower,
it's nine meters high, and on the top is four RGB lasers, which we talked before about, it's the
6-4 RGB lasers that I built myself, and I got some sponsored by a friend, which is the same design
as I did, so we built our own lasers, they got the green and the red modules we buy, but the blue
modules we make ourselves from all the cashier projectors, or not really the old ones, but the new
ones with the laser diodes inside, and each cashier diode, depending on the module, can do something
about 1.4 watts to 2.7 watts per module, so you can build your own blue modules very cheaply,
and have lots of power. Okay, and there's yeah, like the seekers, or what, moving hats, what's the
other... These are the other ESO scanners, and we have two moving hats in the center of the structure,
we have two projectors, which we will use a Resolume to project cool images on the big
tract end, we have the projection map, and then on the top is six marching scanners, and
which we use to control all the lights, so we have a big lights setup with six scanners,
four lasers, two moving hats, and a big big big big big Asmog machine.
Yes, and you're also responsible for the party lighting and the ads, right?
Yes, that's correct, together with big bang productions and the team effort, team re-ash,
we just made one big party tonight, and we hope lots of people come and join in the fun.
Can you tell us a bit about the plans you have for the lighting inside the tent?
Okay, we have to do it very quick in guerrilla style, because the last speaker finishes at seven,
and at nine o'clock the party is close to start, so normally you have a lot of time to build
a train, to hang the lasers, and to do the beam end animation map, to make it safe for the audience,
don't want to cut and lose time in that, so that's a really important part of rigging the lasers.
But next to that, we will have to install the flame throws, if they are allowed, we're now talking
to the rental firm of the tent, if that's allowed, so then we have flame throws inside,
and then we have some moving heads and stuff, which is already there,
which we're going to incorporate in the show, so basically we're going to have a kick-ass party,
I hope, and have lots of fun. Okay, we also already talked a bit about the flame
throwers, but I believe most people are at least me before I came here, the idea of a flame throw
is a guy with some tank on his back, and a big fire out of a gun, that kind of thing,
I'm assuming this is not that kind of thing. No, as always you can have, you can use technology
for good and bad, and well your F-sample is probably in my eyes a bad example, to burn people
and stuff, but this is a for show example, the laser is pointing, sorry the flame throw is pointing
upwards, to have a nice flame effect, and we try to incorporate that, that's at least what I want,
into the laser hopper performance of Greg tonight. We have Greg over, he's the guy from
Britain's Cartelent, which did the laser hop in the show, we had him over, and the night is
going to perform and play some chiptune mix-up with Mario and Fiji and stuff like that,
really cool stuff, he's going to use one of the RGB lasers for that. And you're also responsible
for the laser hop? No, now Greg brought it himself, he didn't build it himself, he's like an
artist and plays it, how am I my dad? And we just want to spice up the performance, and I hope
we can use the flame throw in the performance. Okay, let's see, is there anything else you would
like to mention before we continue? Yeah, didn't really answer your question, I was just thinking
that really didn't answer your question about the flame throw, so yeah basically the flame throw is
like a very fast acting valve, it's operating on 220 volts, and basically there's a high voltage
spike in front of it, so whenever it's activated, it's DMX controlled, or whenever it activates,
then it lights the spark between the two prongs, and then the valve opens and the gas comes out,
and then you have a big fireball over flame, you can choose it, if you open it very short you get
like a big poof, and if you open it longer you get like a real big flame gulping in the air,
going up, and it's across approximately the 2.5 meters high, you can have other machines that do
bigger flames, but what it shows I do, I rather use this one and have lots of 2.5 meter ones,
and have a really big flame throw, because then else you set stuff on fire like woods and forests and
tents. That sounds like a bad idea, well earlier when we were talking you mentioned to me that
every single LED that's on the field here can be addressed and altered individually.
Yeah, that's correct, we have like 70,000 pixels on the LED sleeve, that's around the field,
like 125 volts all around the field, and each pole has a strip with 150 LEDs, and then we have
the LED strip across the road, it's the main part, it's 21 strips of 150 pixels, so there's also
3,000 pixels, the bridges have pixels, the bar is 400 pixels, and the omesign has 350 pixels,
so we have in total around 23, 25,000 pixels, and each picture can be turned on individually.
Okay, let's see, can you tell a bit more about the lightning on the bridges?
Yeah, the bridges use a very nice waterproof pixel, it's basically a metal can with a PCB inside,
and it's epoxy in, so it's a clear epoxy, so it's really waterproof, and it uses like an SPI
type signal to drive the LEDs, it's basically either the WS2812 pixel
controller, and then there's four LEDs on each pixel, so they're really bright, it's like 1.5
watt per pixel, and imagine on the bar, for instance, it's 400 pixels, 600 watts of LED power
shining towards you, it's really bright, and on the bridges it's also like 75 watts of LED pixels
on each side of the bridge, but at least you know where the point is from where you're going to fall
off and into the river. Yeah, and we got some reports from the ISS, the International Space Station
that they saw the light lit up. That's cool, okay. No, that was a joke.
Okay, and well, there's the main road with the latch, you've already mentioned them a few times,
there's some, would you like to continue a bit about those?
Yeah, it would be very nice is that every pole, I said before, is an own DMX universe,
has 150 pixels RGB values, so you need 4 and 50 channels of a 512 channel DMX universe,
so we almost use it fully up, and then it was really hard to get the effect going from one
universe to the other, and with Madrid, so it was very easily be controllable, and we couldn't even
play this play text along the field, so imagine the road is 500 meters long, if you stand on the
beginning of the road you see really cool effects going across, and finally we have it finished,
tonight we'll turn it on and have like a night rider over 500 meters stretch, and night rider
effect, and all kinds of stuff, we have a bouncing ball, we can play pong across it, and really cool,
so yeah, that's really nice. Whoa, you can actually do pong on the lights on the road?
At this moment not, the programming team is working very hard on that to play pong on the road,
and they have two beds on each side and play pong over 500 meters stretch, that would be really,
really funny. That would be a really interesting experience, I will definitely check it out later
You shoot, and also for the people in the field, it's really fun to see that the effect goes across
all the fields, so if you're next to the bar area, you see all the lights going past you and
back and forwards, it's really cool. Okay, let's on the bridge you said that was
how are they integrated into the system, because that's not the DMX system?
That was also artnet, and under each bridge is a PVG tube, which has a HP server power supply,
because those can do like 58 amps at 12 volts, so you have a really high power output, so you can do
some several strings connect to that thing. We made a PVG tube, a really big one, put the
power supply in and made it watertight, and it's underneath the bridges, and it controls the
controller is also in there, and it controls the left strip on each side of the bridge.
And that gets the DMX signal from the matrix controller?
Well, basically artnet, yes, but it sort of DMX over IP, so the artnet packages are sent to the
controller, it strips it off, and then it sends the RGB system, the RGB strips, the SPI code to the
strips. Okay, yeah, you were telling you might wanted to do a building a smoke machine yourself,
what was the final, why didn't you in the end?
Well, in the end, it was, to be honest, there was time constraints, because we wanted to focus
on the lights, but we had some actual setup in our hex space bitler in the Netherlands, we used
I don't know the ring shaped transformers, I don't know in this name for it, but they're like the
the royal door, the royal door transformers, we put a tube through it, and there was like 340
amps of current running through the tube at about one volt, so basically we had a 300 watt
element, and if you just put water in it with a squishing bottle, if you put the water in it,
it immediately evaporated, so our plan was to buy a demi water and glycol, which is basically the
components of smoke fluid, and then mix them together, to have like a 2,000 liters of smoke fluid,
and let them run continually through the tubes, and set the whole filter on, well, in the smoke,
in the cloud as we say. In the cloud. But we will continue to try to make our own
smoke machine, because if you have to buy the big more we have now, it's an output of 5,000 cubic
meters per minute, which is really, really a lot, then you're out of pocket with like 8 grams
or something, and if you can build it for maybe 100 euros, it would be nice.
Yeah, I need. In true heck of spirit, we want to build our own shit, so let's try it.
Yes, you already told about the guy who came in and who brought you a python script, which turned
the pvc-lets into a flame effect. I've seen it running, and it's really cool.
Are there any other effects which people just came in and brought you and gave you?
Not yet, but people are working on it. I know people from technology in Cochent
had the heckerside, sort of the heckerspace in Amsterdam. They have a board and they have a
flame simulation as well, like a flame-open fire simulation, and these guys wanted to try to have
that simulation on the ohm sign, so you see the ohm sign in flames, and it would be really cool
effects. I ask everybody that is still on the field, I want to contribute and think he can write
a program for it. Please contact the LOC, you can call us at LOC, and then we can set you up,
and hopefully you can see your own effects tonight on the 120 poles, or maybe along the path,
or the ohm sign, or the bar, whatever you like, so I really encourage people to write effects for
it, and we hope that this is the start to have an event lighting system, which we maybe even
can use on EMF camp or CC camp, or we just can bring along, because we have paid for this stuff,
it's basically here, and it's a bit of a shame to take it all apart, but we have to decide
on what to do after the event with that, but I hope it will be the start of a nice lighting setup
that we can use to help other events and make cool effects and start and keep developing them,
to make it a better system. Okay, let's see, the controller of POP that he created,
that's a really central part of the system, right? Yes, that's correct, and it was really up
and running, we put a lot of work preparing it in advance, imagine you have the 50 centimeter
PVG tube, there needs to be a block in the middle to hold the power supply, that it doesn't fall off
on the other side, it needs to be open on the down side, on the bottom side, to have condensation
and stuff that builds up during the night to leave that out, the strip is wrapped on the outside,
it's fully IP67 waterproof, so you can just wrap it around and we taped it up and down with
gaffer tape and a tie wrap, and then on top is a cap tool that's keeping the water out of the
controller, so it's basically a tube, block in the middle power supply, 8M5 volt, on top of that
is Bob's controller, and on top of that is a cap tool and make it waterproof, and we put two
screws in the side with a metal wire so we can with a boat hook, we can hook the controller to the
poles. Okay, the lead strips which are on the road, did you also assemble those yourself?
No, unfortunately, unfortunately not, they were produced in China, and we ordered loads of them,
and it was really funny to see the supply first and the test sample very quickly, so we thought,
oh wow, this is really cool, and then we ordered like 140 strips, and it was like totally
in panic, because you have to fabricate and manufacture 700 meters of lead strip for us,
it was comfortable to say it's coming, it's coming, and I'm just busy busy, and in the end
we just stressed them a bit, but then finally he delivered, so just the week before the event we
were wrapping lead strips around pipes, he tubes in a lot of hackerspaces, and I think everybody for
their assistance did. Okay, are there any other lights which you want to talk about how they
how they were created? Well, basically with the spotlights, the floodlights we have, we could build a
big light and light setups in the future, because we have 400 of these,
with these were owned by SA007, he paid for all the lights, so it was really funny to have
somebody helping us out and keep the budget, got the budget, because he bought them basically,
and I rented them from him for the event, so I was basically a good setup, so we don't own
the spotlights, but they're really very bright and very nice, and we can use them to make
in the future maybe other installations, or we can sell them, it's up to SA007 to decide about it.
Okay, well you mentioned the floodlights a few times, for people who have no idea what that means,
could you explain to us what floodlights are? Yeah, it's basically a small factor lamp,
it looks a bit like a construction light, normally these have 500 watts of halogen light bulbs in
them, and this is a very small version of that, it's basically maybe 10 centimeters wide and 6
centimeters high, it's got a lot of LEDs inside, at a very small die, it's basically 2 by 2 centimeters
die, and in there is free one watt LEDs of each color, so there's three watts of red, three
watts of blue, and three watts of green, and it sold as a 10 watt, so we got a bit,
it's not really a 10 watt, it's actually 9 watts. Okay, I heard you explained it a bit
differently to the people who are staying over at FeldW, or at least it was explained differently
to those people, what I heard was that they were told that by the time if that light is going on,
that means that there's excess water, and then the field is going to be flooded, so it's not the
rest of the Netherlands that gets on the water. Yeah, there was a good role, and we also projected it
with a laser on the trees, so it said that the warning flash floods sound, so that really caught
some people's cat and running to the organization to ask what was this all about, if the field was
really flooded, that was actually quite funny. Okay, let's see, can you tell us a bit more about
the software, about what is the matrix software? Yeah, the modern software was kindly
loaned to us for the duration of the event by event design and Amsterdam, it's basically a
lightning design company, and these are the touch resellers for the matrix software, and
so it's a very easy software to control and make quickly make FX, and if you want people can always
check it out on the website, and I hope that someday there will be an open source variety of the
software, that will be nice to do with some people developing our own open source software,
so everybody can use it with the open source controller, and no part will be open source, but
now we are very happy with response ring, and it's very easy to create text effects, especially,
to make them scroll over the bar, and it's got some very nifty features in there to make
mappings, so you can make a very big patch, as they call it, where all the lights are mapped
to the controllers, so basically have an overview of the areas, which are the bar in the field,
you can draw in everything where it is, and then you can make a mapping to a certain controller,
so you can sign groups of controllers, and you can do effects over all the controllers,
or map out a single piece, and just have a scrolling text on the bar, while the starfield
emulation, for instance, is running on the field, so that's really, really nice.
So you really create like more or less bitmaps of groups of lights, which are somewhere on the field,
and if they are close together and you met... But this is an overview indeed, it's an overview,
the patch function allows you to say how much Y and X in how much
fixtures, as it's called in the EMAX fixtures, how many of those you have, and each LED pixel is
a fixture, in this case, so one strip is 150 fixtures, and these are drawn into this patch,
which is basically an overview, and then from there you make the mapping in the device manager,
so when the device manager sees all the artnet devices, and you can do an art pool,
you can press the art pool button, and then it pulls on the whole network, all the devices,
and they all respond with their artnet address, and then you can just assign them,
which is a very nifty feature, because else you have to manually add each of these features, so.
Okay, and then you basically have... So you have then your mapping of fixtures, and let's say you have
the lights on the road, for example, that's like there's... it's with let's say you set every
16 meters there's a pool with the lights on them, and that's like how many LEDs is that across?
It's 150 LEDs, it's 30 LEDs per meter, and the strips are five meters long, and there's two
poles on each side of the road, and so the strip crosses the road. Okay, but as far as the
controlling software is concerned, that's basically 250 by... 500 divided by 16 array of things.
No, it's really actually only 21 lines, but they're spread around at 500 meters, so it's 21 times
which was the road, the 5 meter strip, so it's basically displayed 21 pixels high, and 150 pixels wide.
And that's the way you control it in the control room.
That's the way we control it in the control room, we map it out, and you can even use
other software to control Madrix. So Madrix also has a DMX input, so from a DMX table or a Shamsys
system or pre-styler or whatever, with a certain plugin, you can control Madrix and send out stuff
as well, so you do all the cues you set up, and you can use a simple DMX controller to just
output them by just pressing a button or something, so it's really cool. You can really open
together and Madrix is used in most of the night clips around Europe and maybe some in America as
well in Ibiza, and it's got the ability to control millions of LEDs, like 1.3 million or something,
so it's really cool, and you can also control DMX screens, because some of the new, the Chinese
made lead panels are the... you have a DVI interface, so you can just... they change them together
and have them like really, really, really lots of lights. Who can you tell us a bit about the effects
that you play on those systems? Yes, of course there's the basic color change, which has a fading color,
and then next to that you have a color ramp, which is basically like a rainbow, so it's really
cool for rainbow island, so you can scroll the rainbows across, and then of course the text effects,
and the plasma balls, and the meter balls, and... meter balls? Yeah, it's like balls that bounce
up and down, and really expanding, so you have expanding rings of light on the whole field,
and from the locked hour I can tell you it's a really impressive sight, so people are interested,
they can come to team lock, and we can show them around, but for tonight we tear the lasers down,
bring all the stuff down, but the lights are still viewable from there, and you can make some
beautiful pictures of the scenery of the whole camp with all the lights on. Okay, yes, you're going to
set up the party in a few hours, can you tell us a bit about the setup you're going to build there?
Well, we have four lasers on the stage, and there will be an extra RGB laser in the center for
the laser hub performance, which people can hopefully see on the screen or on a recorded video,
because the cameras also stay in the room, and then we have the four moving heads, the moving heads
are programmed by Big Ben projections, and the SM Trust, which also has some LED lights and pictures.
The moving head, that's basically a beam of light, which can move around,
or rather you can rotate 360 and can do also tilt, so you can tilt it all the way around,
so you can turn it on to back to the backdrop of the stage, so you can project stuff behind the DJ,
or you can just flip them around and go over the ceiling and go into the audience, and you can
basically have a full 360-year-round light effect, and then we have a very powerful sound system,
which we checked last night, and it's going very, very loud, in the lock tent, which is basically
30-40 meters behind the tent, stuff was rumbling on the table, and that was not even on 30% of power,
we hope we have enough musical power as well, and then we all work together, that's really nice,
and we have people from Schubert Philis, that arrange for the audio speakers, and
move people from the Big Ben projections, which arrange for lights and all the stage material,
and then there's Team Lock, that fills in all the gaps and adds the lasers and makes a nice party,
I hope, and you will be controlling the lights on the party, I will be controlling the lasers on
the party, and Big Ben will control the DMX lights, and the moving heads on the stage, and the
lights of the speakers and the performances, so that the artists are also good and are well-visible
on the stage, and we do the lasers, so it's a good creation of the free teams together,
okay, and then you will also be losing, will you also be using the lightning mixer?
We will not use the lock controller, that's one we'll run outside, we'll try to have
an audio feed, plug it into the to the to the LOC VLAN, the lock VLAN, and try to control the
lights, and have to sound of light work on the whole field, with the audio that's played in the
room by the Eintbass DJs, which are really awesome, and the live performance of crack with the
laser harp, so every sound he makes, there will have some effect on the lights on the field,
so it's really cool to have a connection between inside and outside.
Yes, is there anything you'd like to say a bit more about?
Yeah, maybe for the people that are listening that want to build their own lasers,
there's a really, really cool forum, it's called photonlexicon.com, we can add it to the
speaker notes in the end, it's a really cool forum about building your own lasers, so if you are
interested in building lasers, I can only say do it, and because it's the most awesome thing you can
do, and it's really nice to have your own lasers and project text on buildings that are 600 meters
away, and have some really, really great fun with that, or do openings for other hackerspaces,
or make other laser related projects, you should really check out photonlexicon.com,
and there's also a lot of times, there's meetings across the USA and England and Europe,
and there are lots of, lots of meetings that's called laser enthusiast meets, and they're really,
really cool, and you should definitely check the site out and go to the section of the
meets and greets and laser meetings, and check out if there's one in your neighborhood,
so you can learn more about lasers, because that's really awesome hobby, and it can,
yeah, it's really nice to build your own lasers, and especially your own laser modules, even,
only build modules, and then RGB, and then put together with the Galvanometers, the scanner set,
and then some power supplies, but you build your own stuff, it's really, really awesome,
and you can do it on the budget. Galvanometers? Galvanometers, yes, the Galvanometers are
the mirrors that control the beams, so the lasers is basically one, two, or three modules, or more,
you can add as much as you like, of course, you can add them together, the beams are added together
by a dichro with mirror, and then that's basically a color mixing device, you put in a blue beam and
a green beam, and on the other side you get a cyan beam, and you mix that again with a red beam,
for instance, and then you have white, so then you have RGB, you can mix it, and you have all the colors,
and the last step is, of the combined beam, to get onto a pair of mirrors, which are angled at a 90
degree angle, and they take in the beam, they reflect it upwards, and then outwards to the projector,
these two beams can do the X and Y movement. Okay, and that's the Galvanometer. Yeah, Galvanometer
is the name, and most people call it scanner set, or scan set, and you have different speeds in
there, and all of these, of course, but you can have a very low-tech one for probably $50, if you
look around on eBay, and you can go up to thousands of euros if you want to spend it, they have
really big mirrors, and a very fast moving course. Okay, to continue on this subject, how long have
you been working with lasers? Well, maybe 22 years ago, I was in technical school, and then my
teacher came in and brought me one of a very small helium neon tube, 1.5 milliwatts, and they were
used in cash registers, in supermarkets, and these tubes were out of specification, because they
were used a long, they were always on, so these were basically just worn off a bit, and they did
probably 1 milliwatts of output, it got a really high voltage, sorry, 8000 volts to light the tube,
and after we're running it drops down to 1500, it's high power, high voltage, sorry, low power,
but high voltage laser beams, a bit of it was really nice, I built my own pair of scanner mirrors
with DC motors, which I drive with like sine waves, and played around with it, and saw those and
make all kinds of different patterns, then I just basically started working, got a bit about it,
and then maybe 20 years later, like maybe five years ago or something, I saw an ad for people,
for person that sold a green laser, and the green laser, and back in the times 20 years ago was
really a magical thing, because the only thing that can make a green laser back then was an
argon laser, which was a really high gas-powered laser, which is gas inside the tube with a very
high voltage, you need like three phase and lots of amps, and you couldn't even start it
probably in your own home, because it took 63 amps of three phase, so then I was like wow, wow,
really green, 150 milliwatts, oh really cool, lots of power, way back then, so I just thought I
decided to buy the green laser, and then it was sitting on my desk, and it was just outputting one
ray of green light, and it was like well okay, and now, so I just moved it around by hand, which was
very slow, and tedious, so I was like okay, and now, so then I discovered the photon lexicon forum,
and these guys just helped you around and say okay, welcome to the forum, and they gave you tips
and advice, and then basically I started building my first, the 150 milliwatts of green, and it was
really nice, and to do some small parties, and then bigger parties, and then you needed lots of power,
you wanted more colors, but then basically from there on, so five years ago, I just started on,
moved towards what I have now, which is like five RGB projectors, okay, so you built like the actual
laser, you also built like an actual laser, like the light itself, I take the dials from the
Casio projector, and I put them into a block, which I make myself, with the drill press, and just
from aluminium parts, and then from there on, you have to tidy up the beam as we say,
and the standard beam from a blue Casio diode is very wide, there's a very
the fast axis, as they say, is really fast diverging, so if you turn it on the wall,
it will become a stripe of one meter high, and if after a few meters, I was not really usable
for a show use, but then you can compress the beam by two components, which are basically called
the prison pair, so you have two triangles, and you just shine the light through it, and then you
end up with a very very nice and tight beam, which has all the power inside the beam, it's very
visible, and then from there on, you buy two other colors, or you build your own reds, which is
also possible now, and the latest development is the green diode, which we look very much forward to,
because in the second of days, green was made from infrared, infrared was through two crystals,
and then from the other side, you get green beam, so infrared, which transformed into green,
so basically then you have RGB, and then you can make them all together, and then you can make white,
and white light is basically really nice, and to have the power to create every color imaginable.
Cool, yeah, we have about 10 minutes left, do you want to tell a bit about your own setup,
you have your laser setup? I can do that, I built all my lasers from Eliminium, because they're very
if you make them from another metal, probably half of you, if you use iron or steel plates,
and so I do all in Eliminium, for the peoples in Europe, and you can easily do it yourself,
you can use a dremel, you can cut it, it's easy with a belt grinder, and you can just easily
make the part yourself, it's very cheap, it can be sorted locally, or you go to the scrap dealer,
just buy some piece of metal and make it, most important thing is the base plate, base plate needs
to be flat, because you have to align optics, you have a base plate that is already a bit bent,
and you put all the optics on it, and you screw the case together, and maybe the plate gets
straightened, then all your alignment is off, and next to that, then you have to buy the parts
well Ebay is a nice starting point, but also on the forum, I just mentioned photon lexicon is
a big fossil section, where people sell their old stuff, if they move on to bigger configurations,
or try to decide to stop, this awesome hobby, which sometimes happens, and then then you
source all your parts, and the power supplies are very important to have good stable power,
and have good output, and then there's lots of tutorials on the side, and which can help you
build your own projector, with basically you mix the colors together, you go to the
galvanometers, the mirrors, and then outside, and then on the, and then you have several designs,
you can do their power supplies on the bottom, you can put them anywhere you like, actually,
with most of the time people make it a split level design, and they just
have the base plate, and all the modules on top to make a clean room, we have no interaction
with the outside air, and then have all the electronical components in the down part of the
projector, the bottom side, and then have fans blowing around it, and make a supply for
put air, so basically that's, so it doesn't overheat, it doesn't overheat, and that's really important,
I have had some gigs where the laser had to be positioned over some very high powered lights,
and then in the end of the evening you see that the temperature inside the projector is really
going up, and then to the point that the thermal protection kicked in, and then turn off the laser,
because it was overheating actually, and then I was like that strange, normally it doesn't do that,
so I checked it out, and I saw that there's like 50 degree air coming off on the light, and it
was sucked in directly to my laser, which also heated up, so that was not good, so good airflow
is really important to keep your lasers working nice and tight, and then have a big base plate that
can dissipate the heat, and then basically take some time to do the wire properly, grounding is
a very important issue, some people leave the trunk floating, which are dangerous, and B is
can make problems with the projections, if you have the projections you can have very strange
effects happening, or the image is unstable, flickering or is moving about, then most of the time
grounding problem, so always take the proportions to have a proper grounding and ground everything
to earth, and make sure that it's all connected properly, and use good quality connectors, and it's
safety, and if you start with lasers that's really really, which I want to emphasize is be careful,
because nowadays when we started this out with 1.5 milliwatt helium neon tube,
okay you have to be careful with this 1.5 milliwatt, but nowadays you talk about 2.7 watts
of 2 power from one diode, and you just can buy them online, you can just put power on it, use
a current sink, or where it limits driver, and then basically 1, 2.7 watts coming out, and it's
very dangerous for your eyes, so watch out whatever you do. A current sink? Yeah it's a driver that
basically powers a diode, if you turn on the diode straight on a power supply, and you don't limit
the power, it's actually, yeah, you can fry the diode in seconds, so you always have to limit
the current through the diodes, so most of the time for the blue diodes, you have something between
1.5 amps and up to power it, but if you overdo it, you see it overheating, and then some optical
damage can occur, and after that just the diode is just a very expensive LED, which have very dim light,
so basically that's not good, so you need something to limit the current, but if you have even
an LED driver, you can use that to drive a laser diode. Okay, let's see, is there, do you want to
say something about your own personal setup for the end? Yeah, at this moment I use penguins
which is basically not open source, very close source maybe, and after owner would like to see
if there's people around in the hacker community that want to work with me to see if we can build
something open source again, just to have some cool controllers that can do all the stuff we want
with this open source, so we have lots of people working on the project and see if we can make
the software happen and make this something really from the community, and that all the features
that people want to put in can be put in and have a nice project, but it's for the future,
and that really would love to see forward to have open source software, which is available to
everyone, and can be used to drive laser projectors, so you can really build a cheap projector,
but you're not bound, and then not committed to buying really expensive software, would be
nice in everybody can have their hands on a cool setup and could be able to do live controlling
of lasers in a safe way and in a enjoying way. I'm assuming then that the pandricks is software
similar to the matrix software we talked about earlier. A pangolin is a software which very easily
and really nice and configurable, I really like it, I do all my shows with it at this moment,
but then again a set, it's very close sourced, controls cost like $595 USD for the cheap ones,
which is USB, and the Ethernet ones are more expensive, really have a nice feature set,
and really cool effects, and all the stuff is very easy, there's an auto-trace function
to easily trace bitmaps and stuff like that, but don't see a reason why it cannot be open source,
I mean you can have that software and which you need people to write it, and since I cannot
quote myself, I would love to bring the people together, I have a lot of great ideas about it,
we can help think about the software, but we really need people that really want to help out and
program this stuff, and we can do that, so I hope the community is willing to help and we can
make this an awesome project. Okay, well we're nearing the end of the show, and well what's the
biggest laser you have at the moment? That's the last question. It's a 6.5 watt RGB, it's got
four watts of blue, it's got the three watts of green, and it's got three watts of red,
and for a total of a combined output of a balanced weight of 6.5 watts, but if you turn it all on,
we can get to over 8 watts. Over 8 watts, and that's the one that's pretty much located in the
LOC tower. So it's here in the tower right now. It's in the tower right now, and it's cranking out
a 6.5 watt right, so it's really nice. Alright, well thank you for your time, I've really learned a lot,
I think, and I hope that other people are also happy with the information, we'll put the sites in
the show notes, and we'll put a link to your new project in the show notes, so people who are
listening to this later on the HECK public radio or through the streams, and they can also look at
project and see what you can help out. Really, thank you so much for the invitation, and thank you so
much Nidio. You're welcome, I'm happy you were here, and I'm happy you had time between all the
lightning work to tell us what was happening here. Yeah, it was just possible today, the other
days wasn't possible, because we were very busy doing lights over the old terrain, so thanks again
for the invitation, and I hope a lot of people that are on the terrain, I will join the party tonight
at 9 o'clock, starting in track 1. Alright, thank you. Bye bye.
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