finnb5
New Member
Hello! (See below for a TL;DR)
I am a high school student, and I do lighting design for my school. Needless to say, the budget is a little bit tight for our theatre, despite the sports facilities being renovated every year...but that's none of my business. We have a wonderful ETC board which supports DMX, and one moving Chauvet Intimidator Spot 355z IRC. The other 50 or so Altman fixtures have served many a show for the past 17 and a half years, but are now fairly rusty and unreliable.
The department could hardly afford one single $600 Led Par let alone a whole new theatre's worth of them, and our school says they have no money to give, and is very restrictive about allowing fundraising. I'm scared to buy the cheap Chinese units simply because I've heard so many bad things about them, and used lights are rarely the price that I need them to be.
So I got this idea, let me know it its crazy, but there are a bunch of colored LEDs for purchase online, and so wouldn't it theoretically be possible to make a 'ghetto-fixture' if you will by stringing a series of these LEDs together and getting a DMX driver and hooking it up and seeing what would happen.
I have absolutely no expertise in this at all (read: I have no electrical know-how) but from what I can tell, a day with a soldering pen, some wire and a lot of hard work would maybe get me somewhere, which I can totally get. I don't have any frame of reference for how much it might cost, or really any way to go about doing this. I would love some guidance. There are some links at the bottom for what I was looking at in terms of LEDs and DMX drivers but really, I'm clueless
Another thought with the DMX, was to make a dmx controlled dowser for our school projector but I, again, have no clue how to approach the problem.
TL;DR: Everything costs too much for my highschool's budget, how do you make your own stuff?
http://www.ecolocityled.com/category/dmx_led_drivers
http://www.luxeonstar.com/luxeon-rebel-leds
http://www.ledsupply.com/color-high-power-leds
https://www.superbrightleds.com/cat/high-powered/
I am a high school student, and I do lighting design for my school. Needless to say, the budget is a little bit tight for our theatre, despite the sports facilities being renovated every year...but that's none of my business. We have a wonderful ETC board which supports DMX, and one moving Chauvet Intimidator Spot 355z IRC. The other 50 or so Altman fixtures have served many a show for the past 17 and a half years, but are now fairly rusty and unreliable.
The department could hardly afford one single $600 Led Par let alone a whole new theatre's worth of them, and our school says they have no money to give, and is very restrictive about allowing fundraising. I'm scared to buy the cheap Chinese units simply because I've heard so many bad things about them, and used lights are rarely the price that I need them to be.
So I got this idea, let me know it its crazy, but there are a bunch of colored LEDs for purchase online, and so wouldn't it theoretically be possible to make a 'ghetto-fixture' if you will by stringing a series of these LEDs together and getting a DMX driver and hooking it up and seeing what would happen.
I have absolutely no expertise in this at all (read: I have no electrical know-how) but from what I can tell, a day with a soldering pen, some wire and a lot of hard work would maybe get me somewhere, which I can totally get. I don't have any frame of reference for how much it might cost, or really any way to go about doing this. I would love some guidance. There are some links at the bottom for what I was looking at in terms of LEDs and DMX drivers but really, I'm clueless
Another thought with the DMX, was to make a dmx controlled dowser for our school projector but I, again, have no clue how to approach the problem.
TL;DR: Everything costs too much for my highschool's budget, how do you make your own stuff?
http://www.ecolocityled.com/category/dmx_led_drivers
http://www.luxeonstar.com/luxeon-rebel-leds
http://www.ledsupply.com/color-high-power-leds
https://www.superbrightleds.com/cat/high-powered/