Lightshow, part 2

I spent last week trying to go on with my "DMX Lightshow" project: first of all, I finally decided to build a WPF-based interface; since the application will have to refresh at least 40 times per second, having GPU-accelerated graphics will certainly help (and learning WPF can't harm either). I also ended up architecting a nice framework around the basic API of the SIUDI-6C controller.

For instance, the DMX framework now includes a small animation engine that, based on the time signature and the tempo assigned by the user, will ensure that every single animation is correctly timed and executed during the timespan of one or multiple time units (4/4 bars usually, but odd signatures are supported as well).

I tried to keep everything as modular as possible: the workspace can be assembled by the user by adding "modules". Each module will drive one or more DMX channels and will expose a graphical interface especially tailored to the type of appliance that is connected to its channels. At the moment I have only a couple of pretty simple slider-based modules (good enough for the dimmer I currently use), but in the future I'd also like to add modules for lights such as blinders or strobe lights, as soon as I buy them...

The picture above is the current main interface: it's not very pretty, but these are my first steps both with WPF and with DMX...

Anyway, since everything works (more or less), I collected 4 lamps I found lying around at home and plugged them in. Then I fired up "Fear of a Blank Planet" by Porcupine Tree and experimented a bit with the basic animations I built in (the usual cosine and sine functions, plus some others). Some excerpts of my masterpiece:

Video on Vimeo.

I hope I'll have time to improve the application a bit during the next weeks (I found out several weak spots while recording the video above): stay tuned for the next video and, eventually, for some technical posts about WPF.