Remotely operated lighting for Jekyl & Hyde lab table

Hey gang..

Finished a fun little project a bit ago and figured I'd share.. a local community theatre was doing a production of Jekyl and Hyde the musical, and the director came to me looking for ideas on how to get a few small lighting effects on the lab table. He wanted it to be wireless, operated from the control booth, and of course had almost no budget

I wasn't the LD on the show, as I currently had something on stage at my own venue, but I figured it'd be fun to work on the lab table aspect.. Attaching some photos of what I came up with -- don't laugh too hard at how messy it all is, it only had to work for 8 performances, and was installed on a pretty tight timetable...

The finished effect uses:

• 4 RGB LED rings from Adafruit
• 2 x 12v MR16 LED lamps
• 12v motorcycle battery for power
• 1 x WiFi Router/Access Point
• 1 x Raspberry Pi with 8-relay add on board
• a small amount of custom Python code interfacing with the Open Lighting Architecture daemon/library in order to listen for levels for each of the LED rings and for the two relays that were used for the MR16s

The end result is that the theatre's Ion console was able to control RGB+Intensity for each of the four LED rings individually, and also relay status for each of the two relays that were used for the two MR16 bulbs, using sACN.

I know, I know -- using WiFi for sACN... but, it worked flawlessly in this RF environment over the 8 performances, and other than the LED rings and the MR16 lamps, everything came from my "for fun" inventory so the cost was pretty low -- about $65 total for the effect.

Some pics attached (hopefully successfully).. All in all, I was impressed at how it worked, and I'd definitely use the RaspberryPi platform for other one-off effects on the cheap..

Cheers,

Joe

I'm loving Adafruit, Neo Pixels and all the doors the open source electronics world is opening for creative use on stage.