Look, no computer! Arduino-based Touch-Sensitive DMX Lighting Controll

In a recent dash to update our documentation to include the Arduino API, I had to get up to speed with how it works and figure out a simple example to share and show off.
After tossing around some different ideas (robot arm was already taken!) and doing some research, I found a DMX shield for Arduino that looked like it would be a great way to try something new without a lot of hardware engineering. After all, I wanted to focus on the API, not soldering, cutting, and gluing bits and pieces. And as a bonus, we were headed to the NAMM convention to show off all the fun music things the Morph can do, and we thought the added bonus of a lighting controller would really blow some minds.

Here's how I made it.

The Shopping List

The Software List

The Arduino IDE has its own installer - just follow the directions. The Sensel API and DMXSimple folders can be unpacked and installed to the Arduino libraries folder, usually in your user's Documents/Arduino/libraries folder.

Connections

Now that everything arrived, I needed to connect everything and setup the hardware. Here's an image detailing all the connections

Connections for DMX control with Sensel Morph

The first thing I had to figure out was how to talk to the Litake DMX lights. Although DMX is a control standard, different lights have different schemes. In the case of these RGB lights, I had to set their jumpers to the correct position to put them in DMX mode and set a root channel. I was new to this, and found some documentation on the little piece of paper that shipped with the lights, but I still ended up having to tinker and search to get it right. To spare you the trouble I went through, here's some pictures detailing how I set those jumpers:

Setting DMX jumpers for Litake RGB lights for control with Sensel Morph.

Code Part I: Fade Red, Green, and Blue

Before I did anything, I wanted to make sure I could talk to the lights from the Arduino. I used the "Fade" examples in DMX Simple and modified them to suit the communication to the RGB lights I had. Here's an excerpt (you can see the whole sketch in my code repo):

void loop() {
  int brightness;
  /* Simple loop to ramp up brightness */
  for (brightness = 0; brightness <= 127; brightness++) {
    /* Update DMX channel 1 to new brightness */
    DmxSimple.write(1, 127); //brightness
    DmxSimple.write(2, brightness); //R
    DmxSimple.write(3, 255); //G
    DmxSimple.write(4, 255); //B
    /* Small delay to slow down the ramping */
    delay(10);
  }

For confidence, I played with moving the "brightness" variable to the different channels and re-uploading the sketch to the Arduino. Everything worked!

Code Part II: Make a UI

Now that I had figured out how to talk to the light from the Arduino, I had to come up with a control scheme using the Morph and the API. I wanted it simple to demonstrate, but I did want to be able to use pressure and create some simple UI controls that I could print out and place under the Innovator's Overlay.

I worked in Adobe Illustrator to create my interface. I set my units to "millimeters" and created an artboard the size of the active area of the Morph 120mm x 70mm. This not only made sure everything fit, but it simplified the coding, since I could easily plot my "hot zones" for conditional statements, simply by referring to the graphic objects in Illustrator.

Planning DMX UI for Sensel Morph in Illustrator.

As you can see, I've set up controls for 2 different lights, controlling their colors by position and brightness by distance from center. Not obvious is pressure: this will control the "strobe" rate. Fortunately, the lights have a built-in strobe feature, so I don't need to do any timing programming! I've also reserved a couple other zones with the dotted lines for future buttons or modes that I could switch.

Code Part III: Morph Control

I knew this would take some time to figure out, but the main functions I needed to create were

RGB lookup table
Linear Interpolation scheme for RGB values
Parsing contact data from Morph API to create "hot zones"
Cartesian to polar conversion that returns a 0-15 value for lookup table
Radius calculation for distance from center of the color wheels

To create the color lookup table, I researched various color wheels to see how to optimally lay it out. I created a 16 member array of RGB values that matched the colors in my Illustrator sketch.. You can see this at the top of the DMXmorph.ino sketch.

In order to figure out what a contact would do, I needed to look at the stream of contact data, determine if a contact was in a particular zone, then call the appropriate functions based on location and pressure.

If you dive into the code, you can also see that I started to create a "gesture recorder." The idea here is to hold a button, and record the color sweeps and strobes, and have it loop through that data. I never really finished that - I needed to pack up this project and get to NAMM!