My DCcduinos arrived. YAY!

Now I need to buckle down, finish building the pixel modules, and get ready to do some miniature carpentry. Lacking any luck in finding an enclosure I like already made or ready to modify, I'm going to build my own out of thin "project wood" ply.

So far in developing the software, I have the Adafruit library working and have been modifying the 'strandtest' example to get a feel for it. Since this will primarily be a DMX controllable fixture, I want to develop it as a procedure chooser/options chooser.

What's commonly found in DMX stage lights is pre-programmed procedures on ROM in the fixture. Since Matrices require specialized software and interfaces, and many smaller stage/theater setups simply use a console style board (eg, Chauvet Obey series), I'm choosing to go this same well-traveled route.

Here's my TODO: straight from the .ino

void loop() {
//
// TODO: DMX Slave
// take RS485 differential "DMX" input
// and convert it into:
// ch 1 = procedure chooser
// ch 2, 3, 4 = color picker
// and ch 4 = rate
// maybe ch 5 "option" (theater chase spacing?)
//
// Some example procedures showing how to display to the pixels:

Since almost every procedure in the sketch can take some parameters, we need to do the following in loop()

Read DMX input on ch1, determine what procedure we need to run.

Read DMX input on ch2, 3, 4, 5, etc. and math-magic these values into the appropriate values for the procedure we're going to call.

Pass values to the procedure we've chosen.

....since I'm potentially really only using a few cycles to do the needed math operations, I hope it all works out.

However, my Arduino clones arrived yesterday. This means after work last night, I was up until 0200 geeking out on stuff with reckless abandon, and today is my day off. I hear the call of a box full of 9g servos. It says "build a robot".