MichaelF5
Apprentice elf
Morning all,
An idea that's been boiling in my head for a fair while is how to make some ordinary Garden lights smart and give them double duty for being able to adjust for theme days (Xmas/Easter/Halloween etc)
in theory I'm after something fairly normal looking, and personally I like the Tiered look and they give plenty of internal space for Pixels and Electronics
however from there it gets a bit harder, I don't want cables all over the place and while I do have lots of underground conduit for running stuff safely, from what I've been reading when you get a fair few pixels you end up needing a serious load and that ends up meaning a fair load and thick cable.
generally it would be my preference to run something ethernet based as you can push a fair amount of power a decent distance, I'm hoping that I can get some cheap and small PoE power converters to pull power directly out of the cable to run the control inside each Tier and so forth, this may not be a reality and I might end up pushing power to each junction point which I'm basicallly already doing.
so for the tiered lights I would like full control of various pixes in each housing, including which side of the lamp is illuminated/colours/brightness etc
there would be two modes for the lights, in normal duty they'd be sensing the light level in the area the motion sensor is aimed at, then enabling the motion detection below a certain lux level, then depending on where the motion is, gradually bring up the brightness of the illumination in that area... and depending on the lux level, set the final light output of those pixels, maybe even use this to send data back to the DMX(?) controller to let it know to start enabling the other lights adjacent.
then theme mode where the system can do all the usual stuff of controlling each pixel etc
it feels that the DMX side of things is the way to go, feel free to advise otherwise
An idea that's been boiling in my head for a fair while is how to make some ordinary Garden lights smart and give them double duty for being able to adjust for theme days (Xmas/Easter/Halloween etc)
in theory I'm after something fairly normal looking, and personally I like the Tiered look and they give plenty of internal space for Pixels and Electronics
however from there it gets a bit harder, I don't want cables all over the place and while I do have lots of underground conduit for running stuff safely, from what I've been reading when you get a fair few pixels you end up needing a serious load and that ends up meaning a fair load and thick cable.
generally it would be my preference to run something ethernet based as you can push a fair amount of power a decent distance, I'm hoping that I can get some cheap and small PoE power converters to pull power directly out of the cable to run the control inside each Tier and so forth, this may not be a reality and I might end up pushing power to each junction point which I'm basicallly already doing.
so for the tiered lights I would like full control of various pixes in each housing, including which side of the lamp is illuminated/colours/brightness etc
there would be two modes for the lights, in normal duty they'd be sensing the light level in the area the motion sensor is aimed at, then enabling the motion detection below a certain lux level, then depending on where the motion is, gradually bring up the brightness of the illumination in that area... and depending on the lux level, set the final light output of those pixels, maybe even use this to send data back to the DMX(?) controller to let it know to start enabling the other lights adjacent.
then theme mode where the system can do all the usual stuff of controlling each pixel etc
it feels that the DMX side of things is the way to go, feel free to advise otherwise