I am looking to use the Arduino for a wifi Cue Light for theatres,
I am good at assembling, soldering etc but not at code! I am looking to setup a bright LED matrix so that when the arduino receives a signal over wifi from an Ipad or android device it triggers the whole matrix to flash RED (for standby). Then I want to have a physical button to press to acknowledge the signal and send a message back to the IPad. The red light stays on constantly, no flashing.
The Ipad can then send out the GREEN (Go) message. This also flashes and waits for the button to be pressed and send back a message to the ipad, and in so doing steadies the Green light.
Anyone interested in helping? Suggesting suitable LED matrix, wiring and writing code? We already have the Apple and android apps built. Once I can get the code and suitable parts I can happily build the units myself but at the moment I don’t know where to start! Hoping someone here has done something similar or can code it up. looking for the cheapest, simplest option on parts but the LED matrix must be bright and able to switch from Red to Green
thanks Jon
How big is the LED matrix ? How many LEDs ? Is it the same acknowledge button for both standby and go conditions ? Is this powered from the line (perhaps via a wallwart) or from a battery ? Can you spec a max brightness level needed ? Once it’s been in steady green, how long does it stay that way ? Does it go back to off ? By remote command or internal timing ? Does it need to be able to display (cue) numbers and/or letters out of the matrix of LEDs ? If so, up to what number of … errr … numbers (digits) ? :mrgreen:
And what kind of cost are you thinking of ?
Hi, I will try and answer your questions 
I think the Adafruit one will fit the bill best and it comes with a driver chip: http://www.adafruit.com/product/902
One button will acknowledge both states of Green and Red
Powered by a mains adapter down to Arduino or spark core voltage.
Nothing specific, just a good bright image and I believe the Adafruit will be fine on seeing youtube videos of it.
Originally I had the app version stay on green constantly but I am thinking a 20-30 second delay before back to off (internal timing). Down to end users dictating that though.
Yes i would like to see the cue numbers show, we have built the iPad to cope with up to 999, in the centre of the Red or green display and scrolling if necessary then back to a solid colour probably.
Cost as cheap as I can, the hardware if I can get a sparkcore to power the chip rather than arduino with wifi shield should be reasonable.
Being new to Sparkcore I don’t know if it would be able to fire up out of the box and find an unsecured wifi router to use. As it seems to always need to connect to the internet. Users COULD do that but ideally I want to be able to use a wifi router not hooked to the web as some productions would be out on the road. Plus without knowing the name of the router and WEP password in advance it couldn’t easily be setup. I may be asking way to much but it seems a fairly basic functionality to me, just needs to be able to find a router (we could tell them it needs to be called a set name and set wep. Then JUST … to get it to talk to my app on the iPad. I am thinking it would be needed to be branded in 8 flavours, i.e. preset names channel 1, channel 2 etc.
Do you think it is feasible or shall I stick to just that apps?
I can’t say much about the Spark Core, I’ve not really looked into it. I guess the big question is to whether you can depend on all venues providing open access to the Internet. If that’s a given then the SC seems to be a solution.
As for that display, you did see that it’s only 1.2 inches ??
well no, this is my first venture into Sparkcore, I might have to insist on using a dedicated open router for this purpose.
Where that would be an issue we will see.
yes only 1.2, but very bright, had my first one arrive in the post. It might be possible to run two side by side if it doesn’t look big enough. I have seen RF wireless units and their displays aren’t a great deal bigger. Though wired ones can often be very large. As I say is is just a speculative project for now as development costs have been high to date but I would like to give it a go.
Not sure if you get any notification of posts on here? I don’t only chanced on your message. Can always reply to jonshepherd@mac.com if not.
cheers Jon
minstrel27:
Not sure if you get any notification of posts on here?
Go to your User Control Panel, Board Preferences, Edit posting defaults, and put a check in the obvious box.
One other option for your consideration …
I know you want to be able to control the light from your Ipad (or tablet or phone or PC or …) but does it have to go through the Internet ? From how far away do you need this to work ? Because it occurs to me that most such control devices have BlueTooth 4.0 (BLE) built into them now and that can range up to 50m with unrestricted line-of-sight. A system on a chip (SoC) that incorporates BLE can be had for ~15$ (or less) and could certainly handle the mundane tasks of controlling the display and responding to buttons.
http://www.rfduino.com/product/rfd22301 … o-ble-smt/
Hey Jon, my brother actually uses something called touch OSC, which is a configurable app for android that can connect to many different interfaces over a LAN. If you used a middle man, such as a dmx program, and found a way to output that control to arduino you could theoretically make it work over a Local area network
The remote control scheme needed by the OP is quite easy to do with TouchOSC. It does not need any “middle man” or other protocol, just TouchOSC and functions fine over WiFi.
I’ve done this successfully several times for my LED lighting Systems and it works very nicely http://trippylighting.com. As hardware I am using a Teensy 3.0 ($20)https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html connected (on my own custom PCB) to a WIZ820iohttp://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/WIZ … RyJw%3D%3D embedded Ethernet Module ($20). This is connected to a small pocket WiFi router TP-Link TL WR702n ($25).
In fact I’ve written a little tutorial on my blog complete with code example and TouchOSC layout (on GiHub) that explains how to send and receive simp OSC messes with an Arduino Sketch : http://trippylighting.com/teensy-arduin … o-oscuino/