Your other option is to do a very very serious retrofit and
build in the
LED's and a controller for color mixing via
DMX. You would basically be making your own
LED fixture. It's a little more work that you asked for and you must be thinking by now that it isn't for the faint of heart and you would be correct. However, if you are interested I will make my recommendations below.
For the input you would need some kind of micro controller, here you have thousands of options but I will just present three.
For something a lot easier to program you could use an
Arduino Uno. These are super simple to use and if you have absolutely no programming experience you can probably do it. You will need to run a
level converter to get the
DMX data into the controller but the hard low
level programming would be taken care of. The MAX485
level converter works well. This will run you between $15 and $35. At $15 you would probably need to
build your own
arduino from scratch, which is harder, but still not impossible with zero experience. The drawback with this solution is that the
PWM runs at a certain frequency that is probably not fast enough to get really smooth fades to 0 or fades between colors. You could ramp up the
PWM frequency but that isn't super easy. I could tell you how if I found some old code I wrote for this
platform.
Look here for more information on
Arduino:
Arduino - HomePage
You could also get some thing a little more down to earth like some kind of ARM M4
platform. Texas Instuments make a really sweet ARM M4 board that some companies use for prototyping called the TIVA C (
Tiva C LaunchPad Kits) It has a lot of really great features and has way more processing
power than you would need but the boards are pretty cheap. I will warn you though, unless you have some serious programming experience you will not be able to complete the project with this controller. You have to program a lot of low
level stuff. I know about this board because I am using it for a project where I work developing some embedded systems technology. I am a student so I don't have mountains of experience but I do almost have a degree and have put 20+ hours into learning how to dim an
LED and read in data from a serial connection. You will need a
level converter like the MAX485 for this as well.
One major advantage to using the the TIVA C is that you can ramp up the
PWM Frequency pretty majorly and should be able to get decent fades. I'm not sure how well it would
fade to 0 though. You could probably use the TIVA MSP430 with an Energia (
Arduino like) and it would be much simpler but I have zero experience in this regard and so I can't tell you exactly how I think it would go.
The Next thing to chose would be
LED's.
I would recommend the Luxeon Rebel LEDs. They are the same LEDs used in fixtures like the award winning
ETC Seledor D40's and the
ETC Source Four LEDs. This place online called "Steve's LEDs" sells them for pretty cheap and they are already mounted on heat sinks (so they don't get to hot and burn out). You can browse his whole catalog and pick the ones you want but this is a pretty good deal:
Tristar
I recently ordered about $130 worth of LEDs for a project I am working on and I was very satisfied with the quality. You will need to buy resistors and such but if you are really interested in doing the project I would help you with that.
Keep in mind that in
ETC fixtures they use 7 different colors of LEDs to improve color mixing. You could
build something similar but don't try to sell it. The X7 color
system is patented and you could get into legal trouble.
Anyhow, after all of that it just becomes about ripping out the old stuff and putting in the new stuff (and
power supplies but this post is getting long).
)
