LED design

score provides a set of facilities to create content for LED shows:

• Compatibility with LED hardware either through DMX or directly through SPI.
• Authoring tools to create and visualize RGB data.

Tools of the trade

List of useful devices

• Art-Net device: when created without any fixture, the raw DMX channels will be available, as well as the ability to send raw messages to the whole device.

List of useful objects

Most of the objects useful for LED shows are in the process library, in the Control > Mappings and Control > Generators categories.

• Array tool
• Array combiner
• Array recombiner
• Array flattener
• Arraygen
• Arraymap

To generate LED content from shaders, one can use the Lightness Computer object which will convert an input texture into a series of pixels.

To visualize LED output, one can use the LED View process.

Controlling LEDs from a shader

Download the example score here.

An easy way to get great visual results is by leveraging existing ISF Shaders from the shader library (or create custom ones!). The Lightness Computer object will convert the texture generated by a shader node into RGB or RGBW pixels ready to be sent to LEDs.

Creating LEDs from generative array computations

Download the example score here.

To create more generative patterns, or for instance reuse an existing data source, it may be useful to leverage the various array generation tools. The general workflow would be:

1. Generate each R, G, B (optionnally W), channel through whatever means. For instance, the Arraygen object can easily generate an array with N elements.
2. Combine these channels through the Array combiner object. It sports different modes – for LED design the most useful would be Intersperse as it would take each element of the input array and lay them out one by one, that is given three arrays representing the R, G, B values such as [ R, R, R, R ] [ G, G, G, G ] [ B, B, B, B ] this object will output [ R G B R G B R G B R G B ].
3. The Array tool object can be used as a processing step, for instance to easily adjust gain and brightness, add padding to each of the arrays or individual arrays.

Combining multiple LED strips in one array

Download the example score here.

Here again the Array tool and Array combiner can be used.

For instance one can pipe the output of each shader to an Array Tool in order to add pre- or post- padding if necessary, or directly to an Array Combiner in Append mode to put each input one after each other.

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