Project: LoRa-DMX Wireless LED Controller

In the late summer of 2021, I was contracted to implement a remotely-triggered Pixel LED controller for a client. They were looking to create some interesting effects on jumpsuits worn by performers, using LED Pixel-Tape attached to the suits.

A handful of key constraints for this project were:

• There weren't enough DMX addresses available from the lighting controller to do per-pixel control straight from the lighting desk. However:
• The effects still wanted to be controllable in some way from the lighting desk.
• 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi links were ruled out, as the client had had poor experiences with them in the past due to the large number of devices patrons brought into the venue.

From this, I built a pair of projects to be used together. The first is a board which marries together a Pixelblaze LED driver board with a LoRa UART transceiver, along with some power supplies and other supporting hardware. The other is a DMX receiver board which sends specific messages out over a matching LoRa transciver to the pixel driver boards.

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