LED Marquee lights on mobile proscenium

My theatre is doing a few shows coming up - Forever Plaid for starters - that require a proscenium prop. I to make it as useful and flexible as possible, as it may have to travel and will probably be used for years.

I am trying to nail down the marquee lights - I would love to do them in addressable RGB LED strips, but not sure how bright they would need to be or if that is feasible. I would love to get full on "Game Show" with them, but realize that may not be possible. . Anyone ever use this tech on stage? Any pointers?

-RJ

It's certainly possible. There are a number of LED pixel strips or strings that can be made to run chase sequences. A number of vendors make DMX and/or sACN drivers for those strings. The strings require constant DC power and accept a serial byte string that controls what each pixel is doing.

I haven't used this particular product but I have a couple of other DMXKings products that have been very reliable. Use the description to start Googling all the pixel protocols and find suppliers.

https://dmxking.com/led-pixel-control/ledmx4-pro

I am currently deep, deep down the rabbit hole on this one - have a handful of the DMXKing LED board coming, and 100+ meters of LEDs. In the meantime I am crash learning Magicq. I was a lightning designer, but in the old days when DMX was shiny and the idea of needing more than 1 DMX universe was laughably extravagant. The realization that I am going to have almost 3k channels is just nuts. This should be fantastic-

Why so many addresses? a typical Marque chase really only requires 3 or 4. I understand that with LED strips you can address each led individually but you don't HAVE to. If your goal is to achieve "old school' game show look then your're looking at a widely spaced every third or fourth 'Lamp' marquee chase.

That was my original goal - I was going to find some 4 channel marquee strips and do it old school. I was partially hampered by time and money (wow, THAT has never happened before). incandescent bulbs are NOT cheap anymore, and it would be a fortune to do it that way. I had to use off the shelf LED, which left me with at the 150 LEDs per 5 meters length. Those are shockingly cheap - less than $20 a strand for fully addressable RGB. I went with the DMXKing product up above (2 of them). Each DMX King controlled 3 columns, each column had ~300 LEDs on it.

I am no expert, and I understand that the following statement is as much about the DMXKing implementation as it is about the LEDs themselves: the LEDs basically addressed themselves. i.e. 1 =LED 1 red, 2= LED 1 blue, 3=LED 1 green, 4 = LED 2 red, etc. That adds up really quick, but it is the only way I could see to have the level of control I wanted (speed, gaps, etc). Once I got that far, I realized that I had something much more exciting than simple chase possibilities.

I think the only other option with the LED was possible build my own chase controller with an arduino or something - but it certainly wouldn't have the flexibility and wow factor we ended up with. Plus, a handful of student got to play with things a couple decades in ahead of their fresnels.

Here are a few quick clips of the 'crazier' moments. We had to be very careful about overdoing it in the show, and usually we had simple, subtle color changes. These are a crazy bit and the finale-

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