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Cosmic Color Ribbon Videos


LightORamaDan

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LightORamaDan wrote:


Since the cable comes with a 150 channel controller, I'm assuming it can link with the rest of my display and show up as an extra 150 channels in my LOR software - except that would be a total pain (140 channels is hard enough to handle now). Yes it links into the network like any other controller.

So I guess that's where macro-mode comes in. The confusion seems to be whether the "3 channles" used for, say, a single-color right leap come from the CC controller or my other channels. The first 150 channels in the controller directly address the RGB LEDs on the string. You have complete of each of the 50 pixels. Starting with channel 151 there are 7 effects channels. In the demo videos, only those 7 channels were used (I think!).

So I think what we are not understaning is: are any of our existing channels ever needed to run the CC, or does its controller handle the entire cable. As mentioned above you can address the 150 channels directly or you can use the macro channels so to work at a higher level.






Complete control of the 150 channels? That to me at least sounds like a color picker is not in the works???

Does this mean that if you choose to not use the macro function then we have to program 50 channel red, 50 green and 50 blue?

Please tell me it isnt so! Tell me you have an S2 upgrade where I can view it as one 50 channel controller and choose colors!!!

Just in case:

If that is not the case, will I be able to sequence this with aurora? I have several chases with my firefly that consist of different colors chasing each other, and it doesnt look like the macro effect will be able to address this and doing it for 150 individual channels seems brutal.

(on the 2nd video it looks like some color chases, but hard to tell with the video, can you post the sequence so we can look at it?)

If you tell me you will have a color picker in time for christmas I will wholeheartedly back LOR and replace my 4 firefly arches with 4 of these babies........(but if you dont then I will have to think)
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rickharp wrote:

The strips have stand-alone eeproms that are twice as large as previous LOR controllers.



What you eluding to. are the larger eproms providing more light or more likely not to burn up. bigger is better for longevity...??


EEPROMs are memory devices. In the case of the LOR controller, they hold the firmware that runs the controller; it is analagous to the hard drive on your laptop. For instance, a recent update included routines that enable the external inputs. The firmware can only be as large as the EEPROM that holds it. I don't know how full the EEPROM on the LOR boxes is, but it ultimately limits the numer of new features the box can support.

The CCR has a larger memory. Because the CCR ultimately is a 150 channel device, and must have much more sophisticated firmware, it stands to reason the EEPROM must be larger than the LOR boxes. Hopefully, the EEPROM has a fair amount of unused space for future enhancements.

As to the notion of the EEPROM providing more light, it doesn't work that way. The max lumens of the lights are decided by the external circuitry. In fact, the channels in the CCR are much different and simpler than the channels in your LOR box. Your LOR controller was all about power per channel - and potentially lots of it if you are driving incandescent bulbs. The CCR Controller is a PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) RGB (Red Green Blue) controller. The LEDs are controlled through just a few signals. First, an LED in the series is addressed, then it is told what color and intensity it needs to be. This is done through a series of pulses. Each of the LEDs in the strip is controlled in this fashion, and all 150 are updated in the blink of an eye. Because each channel controls exactly one tri-color LED, the controller is extremely low power (I believe it runs on 12VDC).

RGB LED ribbon is often used by car enthusiasts for lighting the underside of their cars. The strip is only a few feet long and encased in solid plastic. The controller is in the car and is used to change the color.

If you Google "RGB LED Ribbon", you will see that you can buy this by the reel, and controllers are also widely sold. The LOR version is unique in that it is made to work with the LOR controllers. Based on pricing I have seen, the LOR CCR is not a bad deal - especially at the current sale price. I'm still concerned about the long term life, though. Granted, anything installed under a car should be pretty rugged, but we will be flexing them, and subjecting them to pretty extreme weather conditions. I still worry about UV effects.

To see how the controller works, Google "RGB PWM Controller". Atmel has an interesting white paper on the subject.

By the way, in researching the subject, I answered one of my own concerns. It appears that - like Rope Lights - the LED strips are made up of smaller strips that are connected at the ends (usually soldered together). So if your 16ft CCR were to fail due to too tight a radius or someone stepping on it (OUCH!), I think that section would be damaged only. It should be possible to open the plastic and replace the failed portioc of the strip with a replacement section, then re-close the plastic. Everything I have seen points to the idea that most vendors of this LED ribbon follow the same spec, so they should be interchangable.

This defnitely marks the Next Generation for light displays - basically blowing right past LED strings. One (non recession-friendly) application that comes to mind with the CCR is running about 7 or 8 of them in parallel in order to create text displays (basically a long dot-matrix display). Imagine scrolling messages during your show ("Tune To", song titles, lyrics). A 16-foot sign is a little overkill, though.
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LightORamaDan wrote:


So I guess that's where macro-mode comes in. The confusion seems to be whether the "3 channles" used for, say, a single-color right leap come from the CC controller or my other channels. The first 150 channels in the controller directly address the RGB LEDs on the string. You have complete of each of the 50 pixels. Starting with channel 151 there are 7 effects channels. In the demo videos, only those 7 channels were used (I think!).

So I think what we are not understaning is: are any of our existing channels ever needed to run the CC, or does its controller handle the entire cable. As mentioned above you can address the 150 channels directly or you can use the macro channels so to work at a higher level.

Channel 151 - Sets resolution to 1, 2, 5, 10, 16, 17, 25 or 50 pixels

Channel 152 - Set Macro Effect like "Fill Left to Right", "Fill Right To Left", "Ends to Center", "Center to Ends', ....

Channel 153 - Number of pixels in a group

Channel 154 - Fill position - for example: An intensity of 10% would fill the string 1/10 of the way. When you see those fast jumps , it is just a quick fade on or fade off on channel 154.

Channel 155 - Color effect

Channel 156 Speed of color effect

Channel 157 Intensity of color effect.




Piecing together other information, it appears there are 150 'light sources', each of which has 3 color elements in it. So 3 of these 'light sources' make up a 'pixel', correct? And a 'pixel' would be a 'dash' rather than a 'point'?

The macro effects sound very promising, but I notice that it does not appear that there is any specification of which color(s) to use for them in the 7 'macro' channels. It sounds like to add one of these to my display, I would need to allocate 157 channels in the sequencer, correct?
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John Hertig wrote:

LightORamaDan wrote:

Piecing together other information, it appears there are 150 'light sources', each of which has 3 color elements in it. So 3 of these 'light sources' make up a 'pixel', correct? And a 'pixel' would be a 'dash' rather than a 'point'?

Yes, a pixel at its finest resolution looks to be a dash. Guess that menas that multiple CCRs in parallel wouldn't create dot-matrix sign. I can't tell if this is an initial limitation of the sequencing software or the mini-controller on the ribbon segment itself.

By the way, my previous post suggested that this cable was standard and that a damaged section could be replaced by off-the-shelf cable. I take that back. In standard RGB ribbon, the whole length is a pixel. The addition of that rectangular black IC allows each section to be individually addressable. Pretty cool. I do still believe that a damaged section of the CCR can be re-spliced with a replacement section from another.
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Wow. I was trying to figure out how many extra LOR boxes I would need to drive these suckers. Now I get it -- the strip is it's OWN 157+ channel controller?!? So each pixel can show up as a channel in the Sequence editor (if I want to program that granularly)? That is AWESOME.



I think I'd use the macro effects most of the time, but not having to spare any the limited LOR controller channels is great.

I'm thinking that 6 of these strips "bent" in half at the top would make a sweet ~8' high, 12-spoke, mid-sized Mega Tree.

...I guess my 6 month hiatus from working on light-stuff is over.

Thanks, LOR.

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Hmm. interesting thought about a mega tree out of them however, the viewing radius of the LED's are 120 degrees. Therefore, the back of the tree would not be visible from the front like a standard bulb tree is.

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HowardShank wrote:

Hmm. interesting thought about a mega tree out of them however, the viewing radius of the LED's are 120 degrees. Therefore, the back of the tree would not be visible from the front like a standard bulb tree is.


RGB ribbon is manufactured in a "side view" form where the LEDs are mounted on the edge. Maybe LOR will use those for the next generation. In a year or two maybe rope light will be sold like this. That would be the ultimate.
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brianfox wrote:

HowardShank wrote:
Hmm. interesting thought about a mega tree out of them however, the viewing radius of the LED's are 120 degrees. Therefore, the back of the tree would not be visible from the front like a standard bulb tree is.


RGB ribbon is manufactured in a "side view" form where the LEDs are mounted on the edge. Maybe LOR will use those for the next generation. In a year or two maybe rope light will be sold like this. That would be the ultimate.




Thanks for the heads up. I didn't catch that. i think it would still work, but would need it toward the back of the display. I guess I'll have to get one to see how "bendy" and manuverable they actually are.
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brianfox wrote:

John Hertig wrote:
LightORamaDan wrote:

Piecing together other information, it appears there are 150 'light sources', each of which has 3 color elements in it. So 3 of these 'light sources' make up a 'pixel', correct? And a 'pixel' would be a 'dash' rather than a 'point'?

From the pictures, it looks like the pixel is indeed a point. The RGB LED is a single small square device, not three discrete LEDs in a row.

I could be wrong about this, but... the LOR picture shows a segment of the overall cable. This segment contains three pixels (3 RGB LEDs). The segments are spliced together at the ends. I believe the black rectangular device is some sort of MUX that allows specific LEDs to be addressed by the PWM logic. The LEDs on normal RGB ribbon are not individually controlled; the whole ribbon is a solid color.

It is all very confusing but we will have more information out soon to help answer some of the questions.

Our use of the word pixel also leads to some confusion. The CCR can be set to different resolutions simular to the way that a monitor on a PC can be set to different resolutions. But there are big differences.

At its lowest resolution (1) the whole CCR strip (all 150 RGB LEDs) is one pixel. Because it is one RGB pixel, it is controlled by 3 channels: one channel for Red, one channel for Green and one channel for Blue.... With a resolution of 1 the strip's color can be one color only. If you adjust the Red channel then all of the red components of each of the 150 LEDs on the strip is affected.

At the next resolution (2) the whole CCR strip is two pixels (the first 75 RGB LEDs are one pixel, the second 75 RGB LEDs is the second pixel). With a resolution of 2 the strip's color can be controlled by 6 channels. 3 channels for the Red Green Blue of the first pixel, 3 channels for the Red Green Blue of the second pixel.

At the highest resolution (50) the CCR strip is 50 pixels ( the first 3 RGB LEDs are the first pixel, the next 3 RGB LEDs are the next pixel... It will take 150 channels to control the color.

Each of the 150 RGB LEDs on the strip has a Red LED, A Green LED and a Blue LED in side of it. So in some terms there are 450 LEDS on the strip ( 150 red, 150 Green,...)

To the point of a Pixel being a strip vs a point... Yes it is. That strip is anywhere from 3 LEDs to 150 LEDs long depending on the resolution that is set on the strip. The physical characteristics of the CCR are such that the highest resolution we can have is 50 thus at the highest resolution groups of three LEDs will be acting the same.


In most of the video demonstration, the strip was set to a single pixel and here is where some of the magic of the macros comes into play. Because it is set to a single color you can set the color with 3 channels BUT at the same time with the macros you can have motion within that single pixel.
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LightORamaDan wrote:

brianfox wrote:
John Hertig wrote:
LightORamaDan wrote:

Piecing together other information, it appears there are 150 'light sources', each of which has 3 color elements in it. So 3 of these 'light sources' make up a 'pixel', correct? And a 'pixel' would be a 'dash' rather than a 'point'?

From the pictures, it looks like the pixel is indeed a point. The RGB LED is a single small square device, not three discrete LEDs in a row.

I could be wrong about this, but... the LOR picture shows a segment of the overall cable. This segment contains three pixels (3 RGB LEDs). The segments are spliced together at the ends. I believe the black rectangular device is some sort of MUX that allows specific LEDs to be addressed by the PWM logic. The LEDs on normal RGB ribbon are not individually controlled; the whole ribbon is a solid color.

It is all very confusing but we will have more information out soon to help answer some of the questions.

Our use of the word pixel also leads to some confusion. The CCR can be set to different resolutions simular to the way that a monitor on a PC can be set to different resolutions. But there are big differences.

At its lowest resolution (1) the whole CCR strip (all 150 RGB LEDs) is one pixel. Because it is one RGB pixel, it is controlled by 3 channels: one channel for Red, one channel for Green and one channel for Blue.... With a resolution of 1 the strip's color can be one color only. If you adjust the Red channel then all of the red components of each of the 150 LEDs on the strip is affected.

At the next resolution (2) the whole CCR strip is two pixels (the first 75 RGB LEDs are one pixel, the second 75 RGB LEDs is the second pixel). With a resolution of 2 the strip's color can be controlled by 6 channels. 3 channels for the Red Green Blue of the first pixel, 3 channels for the Red Green Blue of the second pixel.

At the highest resolution (50) the CCR strip is 50 pixels ( the first 3 RGB LEDs are the first pixel, the next 3 RGB LEDs are the next pixel... It will take 150 channels to control the color.

Each of the 150 RGB LEDs on the strip has a Red LED, A Green LED and a Blue LED in side of it. So in some terms there are 450 LEDS on the strip ( 150 red, 150 Green,...)

To the point of a Pixel being a strip vs a point... Yes it is. That strip is anywhere from 3 LEDs to 150 LEDs long depending on the resolution that is set on the strip. The physical characteristics of the CCR are such that the highest resolution we can have is 50 thus at the highest resolution groups of three LEDs will be acting the same.


In most of the video demonstration, the strip was set to a single pixel and here is where some of the magic of the macros comes into play. Because it is set to a single color you can set the color with 3 channels BUT at the same time with the macros you can have motion within that single pixel.




So it's pretty much official, no RGB color picker yet?

Is that something that you might work on for next year, or should I give up on it?
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thebaronn wrote:


So it's pretty much official, no RGB color picker yet?

Is that something that you might work on for next year, or should I give up on it?


The Cosmic Color Ribbon (CCR) is the first RGB product from LOR. The CCR will be supported in the S2 software when we ship the product. Software support will include various things including the concept of a RGB channel and the ability to choose colors for that channel.

Dan
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Hi Felas , me again

i have one cuestion, are there son manual video tutorial how instal the ribon led package with my lor16 channels?

thanks

its water proof?

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I have a question. I've made sure all my current white LED's are the "warm" (look like incadescent lights) and not the "cool" (has a bluish tint). What does the "white" look like on the Cosmic Color Ribbon?

I'm guessing since there are 2,000,000 color posibilities that I could find something that would match my white lights but would like to know what the default white looks like.

Jeff

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barbosaa wrote:

Hi Felas , me again

i have one cuestion, are there son manual video tutorial how instal the ribon led package with my lor16 channels?

thanks

its water proof?


Yes it is water proof... We will have some turorials but they will not be ready for some tme.
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JeffBlan wrote:

I have a question. I've made sure all my current white LED's are the "warm" (look like incadescent lights) and not the "cool" (has a bluish tint). What does the "white" look like on the Cosmic Color Ribbon?

I'm guessing since there are 2,000,000 color posibilities that I could find something that would match my white lights but would like to know what the default white looks like.

Jeff

I did not see a bluish tint when they were white. They look very white to me.
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JeffBlan wrote:

I have a question. I've made sure all my current white LED's are the "warm" (look like incadescent lights) and not the "cool" (has a bluish tint). What does the "white" look like on the Cosmic Color Ribbon?

White LEDs are made by coating blue LEDs with phosphor. More layers of phosphor can produce a broader color spectrum, producing a more "warm" white. "Warm" white LEDs cost more to produce than "cool" white LEDs, which let more of the light from the blue LED to show.

On the other hand, a RGB LED, such as those used in the CCR, produces white by combining all three primary (additive) colors. Therefore, the white will only have a bluish tint if you purposely set the red intensity lower. You could also make a white with a yellowish tint by setting the blue intensity lower.
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Steven wrote:

White LEDs are made by coating blue LEDs with phosphor. More layers of phosphor can produce a broader color spectrum, producing a more "warm" white. "Warm" white LEDs cost more to produce than "cool" white LEDs, which let more of the light from the blue LED to show.

On the other hand, a RGB LED, such as those used in the CCR, produces white by combining all three primary (additive) colors. Therefore, the white will only have a bluish tint if you purposely set the red intensity lower. You could also make a white with a yellowish tint by setting the blue intensity lower.


Steven,

Did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night:) Thanks for the infomation and as I was looking at your picture, do you take your hat off when you eat?

Dan
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Steven,

Thanks for the insight! I never really knew the details of why some looked "warm" and the others "cool". Your explanation was very helpful.

Jeff

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LightORamaDan wrote:

Did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night:) Thanks for the infomation and as I was looking at your picture, do you take your hat off when you eat?

That was from Halloween 2003. If I remember correctly, I think I ate lunch while wearing the crown. :)
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