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1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.304s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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niccl ◴[] No.35737795[source]
Not sure if this counts:

A lighting desk for my hobby of lighting live music. For reasons I like doing live control along with the music (known as busking). Existing things are either limited and can't control moving lights, or don't have the flexibility to busk the way I want. so, having worked a long time ago for a crowd that built what were at the time the best lighting desks in the world, I built my own

It has 36 motorised faders and a bunch of other boards with buttons, that each ave their own AtTiny to run the function, they talk to a BeagleBone Black which runs the main code loop and uses its on board realtime processors to generate DMX, and a raspberry Pi to run the GUI for configuration.

Worked a treat most of the time, and I've done hundreds of shows with it, with crowds of up to 400 people, Sadly, I made a dumb decision on the protocol for the fader and button boards to talk to the BeagleBone and every now and then it causes a kernel panic on the Beaglebone, which means at best you lose control of the lights and at worst it goes dark on stage.

I started a redesign using a more sensible protocol but got hit by a double whammy of Covid killing the live music scene for a couple of years, plus the all the supply chain issues, so it's on hold now.

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1. tleb_ ◴[] No.35740332[source]
Cool stuff. I've got the same hobby / part-time job (mostly on GrandMA consoles). I have done two-three experiments on custom software to emit DMX which I used for something like four events. For the physical interface I'm relying on MIDI controllers; I first want a software stack I can trust before going into hardware design.

Would love to discuss the topic some more! I don't often meet people with that same interest in lighting that want to build their own tools.