I've been looking into controllable coloured lighting for a while. I'd
like to be able to have coloured lighting and be able to control the
colour programmatically. (No disco lighting effects! Just a gentle
colour wash for mood lighting.)
I discovered the DMX standard which is used for stage and disco
lighting and also increasingly for architectural lighting. Trouble is,
much of it is quite pricy. Pulsar do a nice range of LED lighting -
the Chroma Range. This
includes some very nice looking medium-sized lights and some small
MR16 lights. You need to buy an external controller for DMX which
makes it pretty expensive. The main thing that puts me off is that
there's no low cost way of trying this out, just to run a single MR16
fixture I need a controller costing several hundred pounds. The MR16
bulbs are controlled by 0-10v for each colour so there might be a way
of controlling them directly, but that sounds like a lot of trouble.
There are some cheapish remote control LED MR16
lights,
but we're mostly avoiding IR for control and it's pretty hard to do
central control in a reliable way.
There's also the Mirage LED
light from NJD which has
built-in DMX. This has a built-in fan which might make a bit of noise
(though NJD say it's pretty quiet). This is reasonably priced, but
it's quite a big fixture. We might look at this in the future.
Recently, I saw some reasonably priced LED PAR 36 lights (these are
small DJ/stage lights) on eBay. This lead me to investigate a bit more
and I found similar Showtec LED PAR 36
lights
for 50 GBP + vat. They look slightly industrial, but come in chrome
and shouldn't look out of place in our house (we don't exactly go it
for country cottage style). These have DMX built-in, so no need for an
expensive controller.
I'd already looked in to how to control DMX lighting from a
computer. Milford Instruments do controller
boards, that allow you to
send DMX commands through a serial port.
DMX lights are connected in a daisy chain. DMX has 512 channels and
each fixture responds only to the commands on its channels. Each
fixture may have a number of channels for controlling different
colours and other features such as pan and tilt. This approach means
that you can control a large number of lights from a single control
board. (DMX does support multiple 'universes' if you need more that
512 channels, but I don't think we're likely to get there ;-)
We've ordered one of the lights plus a DMX cable and the DMX control
board. The board turned up yesterday and we're waiting (impatiently)
for the light.
