LED Pixel Mapping workflow
  • kim.reff
    junior Member
    Posts: 2
    Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:12 pm

    LED Pixel Mapping workflow

    by kim.reff » Wed Dec 14, 2022 12:45 am

    Hey,

    i am not so sure if this is the right forum for this, i just wanted to give some workflow feedback i guess :)

    i am setting up a bigger installation with mad mapper for the first time at the very moment (it's roughly 250 universes of WS2815 in a staircase ceiling which will later be covered by some opaque plastic). Hardwarewise it was kind of tedious and did not work out too good here and there, but due to the fact it was our first time and there was little to no pre-planning because of the spontaneous nature of the job, well... it kinda worked out okayish :)

    but now to madmapper: i was thinking a lot about how to easily accomplish all the adressing and stuff and did a file prior to installing the stuff. so i knew i had like 22x 3,2 metres here (~192 px) and 45x 2,5m strips there (~150 px) and so on. So what i first did was doing a rough layout of the staircase and the pixels in affinity designer in two different styles, a flat horizontal one and one that kind of resembled the actual layout of the winding up staircase. I then tried to export this as an SVG but somehow could not get it to work properly. it was no problem to import the SVG Lines but i couldn't really generate fixtures from that file. i am pretty sure this was more of a user mistake, but i'd love to hear you guys opinions about how to best start with a project like that in the most easy way :)

    i ended up importing my "template" as a image input for a "template-quad" and take that output as an input for my dmx fixtures. of course i messed up a bit by starting to create fixture lines at first which can only be properly resized in one direction via handle. so i deleted them again, did a fixture definition for every approximate pixel length for every field (they differed quite a lot so i ended up with roughly 10 fixture definitions). i also could not really use the "matrix" style with several rows because every field had different spacings between each lines. complicated stuff. good thing about fixtures: they snap onto each other and the dimensions can be precisely typed in in the input dimensions field. now we're heading towards a wishlist feature, hold on :D i finally decided to ditch the template i made for now, yet still wanted a good representation of the actual size of the different led strip lines. so i just decided to make every fixture exactly as many pixels wide as they physically have and 10 pixels thick. this way i could easily guesstimate the differing distances between the lines and put them into relation.

    so far so good, but:

    -it would be awesome if we could either change the default dimensions of dmx fixtures in the fixture editor itself and/or change the input size and position of multiple dmx fixtures at once. (as of now the input field disappears when selecting multiple fixtures so you have to go through each and every one).

    -next up in my list would be the behaviour of 180 degree rotaded fixtures, but as i am wring i am not quite sure if i may have overseen a revert button or something. what i did was rotating the lines by 180 degrees that go backwards (zig-zag-style-cabling), remember every line is a unique fixture in my case, so i did not make use of the matrix feature. what bugged me a bit was that the position coordinates also kind of flipped around, which makes sense because my former top left corner is now at the bottom right. but if you want to precisely type in numbers to align fixtures it quickly becomes a bit annoying. if i did not just overssen it, it would be cool to have a revert button per fixtures that does not mess with the geometry (so i can still position at least the first fixtures that are the "snap target" by typing in whole numbers precisely)

    -we had to use a very cheap chinese brand of artnet-spi controller because it was the only thing that could be delivered in time. this kind of brand has 4 spi outputs with 680 pixels max per spi line. but you can only patch one universe with consecutive adresses to each spi output. the default way of patching in madmapper is what i would have loved to do, just starting every line with a universe and ditching the rest (aka Line 1 Universe 0|1-367 Line 2 Universe 1|1-367...) but sadly the controller could not be set up that way. furthermore troublesome was that we almost always had more than one universe (over 170 pixels) per line and sometimes it was short by two or three pixels, sometimes longer. so i had to manually adjust every line to match. a bit tedious. maybe there is an option to switch to a consecutive usage of adresses per default when adding a new fixture?

    -also a really nice to have feature would be a button to readress the rig when you mess around with already patched fixtures. i sometimes had to adjust one or two lines after patching it roughly beforehand and then had to adjust all the lines after that on the same SPI Line as well because they did not auto update. i think it should not be auto updating by default, but it would be nice to have a right click menu or so to recalculate adresses of selected fixtures automatically.

    -last but not least: as i mentioned, my rig was a bit of a mess and i had different lengths of pixels everywhere. maybe it would be a good idea to add a "custom fixture template" that you can simply throw in and adjust it on a per fixture / line base. at the moment i was doing it like this: okay all those 22 fixtures "should have" 186 pixels. so i create a fixture of 186 width and 1 height. now while patching i see that one fixture only has 184 pixels (due to architectonical reasons or being drunk while cutting) and some others are 183 or 189 pixels long. i cant just skip them in patch because my controller demands consecutive adresses, so i need to make a fixture with 186, another with 183 and another one with 189 pixels. i think a good idea would be a fixture that just can be thrown on any odd one out and be adjusted in its own tab without changing all the others.

    ayayay that was a lot of text. the stuff mentioned are really only minor issues, surely theres more clever was to achieve what i was achieving the rather hard way. but maybe it can be a bit helpful to hear something from a user perspective.

    will post some pictures soon of my staircase, theres still some NDA going on :x

    cheers,

    kim
  • kim.reff
    junior Member
    Posts: 2
    Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:12 pm

    Re: LED Pixel Mapping workflow

    by kim.reff » Wed Dec 14, 2022 9:58 pm

    okay, some things got clearer today when finalizing the rough setup :) the beforementioned 180 degree turn of the input is of course not necessary, you can just flip it. dumb me. so thats definetely not an issue. also the checkbox for "skip last universe channels" does the trick for my patching issue (although i had some weird things going on when not checking it, but that might have to do with my controller and/or brain).

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