Hi!
I been a user since this came out and i have been able to always think stuff that is cool to me, thanks to this awsome software
I recently discover a corean band that uses a lighstick and they use it on their show so it took my whole attention.
eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMgx6lszIyo
too many questions came in my head
what protocol u think is used, does something similar can be archive with wled?
and if does, imagine what things can be done if you put ledfx on it
greetings!
Hi!
Yep, these are super cool. They seem to be using some kind of bluetooth mesh control to build a huge display. The user needs to register their seat number in an app so that the effects get mapped correctly.
Same could be done with WLED, but WiFi is less practical as a protocol for this sort of thing. Still, with an E1.31 network it would be quite cool. Of course someone would need to manufacture these in quantities of thousands…
Cheers!
Hi
Did anyone find out, what kind of mesh they are using, it’s incredible fast.
There is this ESP32 mesh, maybe it is this.
Thanks
Harald
What do you refeer by kind of mesh if you don’t mind? @harueg
@Aircoookie since e1.31 is sended trough udp and in this large scale is not feasible. Does the esp32 can be a candidate to handle Bluetooth interface?
Yep, this can be implemented with an ESP32 and Bluetooth!
E1.31 would be feasible with the universes feature. The problem is rather WiFi, as most access points can’t handle more than 100 clients, let alone thousands. Might work with some cleverly distributed system though. Also there is apparently an ESP8266 WiFi mesh functionality, that could be interesting as well.
However I don’t think WLED is really ideal for this kind of application. A light stick just has a single LED (imagine how cool it would be if it had multiple though!) and with it just being controlled by the show management the flexibility of WLED is not really needed 
Think on a smaller scale for a moment. Neighborhood party, LAN party, dance party with DJ and light show, not a full scale area thousands of people type of show. WLED could in that case make for an interesting option, or at least a fantastic fork of WLED that enabled that type of effect where the lights were coordinated.
For example, LAN party with LED lighted PC enclosures, with coordinated control from WLED. Could make for a more interesting LAN party.
Neighborhood party where all the houses are lit with LED strips controlled by WLED, coordinating their effects. Would be fantastic to enable something like that. I know with WLED’s UDP sync that is not possible without some smart gateway to sync them all up, or perhaps there is a way and I don’t know it. 
Indeed on a smaller scale this would be feasible. But these concert sticks as well as coordinated christmas lighting etc. are all run from a central control instance like xLights. Of course WLED could sync the entire neighborhood to one effect, but not necessarily with different ones still looking good in unison. Maybe the playlist feature can change that though once I finally get around to implementing filesystem support.
Hi everybody,
I was working on live stage events (before COVID, of course) and first time I saw this was in a Coldplay show, where people wear bracelets (xylobands) with this function. AFAIK those xylobands work with RF, and were limited to few zones (10 or so).
TLDR, I don’t know exactly how to implement this massive light show but I have some keys:
If we assume 100.000 people, RGB devices, we have 300.000 dmx channels, more than 585 universes!! (professional grade light desk like GrandMA2 or MagicQ manage between 64 and 256). The best approach for controlling this in pro work is software like Resolume, Arkaos, Lightjams or other pixelmap soft with artnet/sACN(e131) output.
Normal APs are rated to only a hundred of devices (theorical limit are 250), but this is a bandwidth limit mainly. In this case, ligth devices only receive little info: each universe needs 250kbit/s, so we need a theorical bandwidth of less than 20MB/s (but in those live events we try to use gigabit networks when using more than 60 universes to avoid broadcast problems). In unicast (or multicast) mode, devices only receive it’s signal, so we could optimize network traffic. In those cases, I think some good APs could reach theorical 250 clients limit (about 1MB/s per client in a wifi-n!!), so we need 400 APs!
More problematic is IP protocol; maybe we could use a class B (or even A) directioning and powerful switches, or some routers and different class B/C networks to manage this amount of devices.
If you want to use WLED (or some similar firmware), you’ll need to flash a lightweight version, maybe w/o web server and flashing each device with right parameters in batch flashing.
Long short history, I think RF or zigbee is more suitable to make this, haha.
Byez
P.S.: maybe you could control a neighborhood controlling each xLights from a main control system (maybe VPN thru the internet?) instead of controlling pixels directlly (we do this way in live events with media servers, for example).
RF is definitely the way to go for blindly sending data to lots of devices without investing in a lot of architecture. One 433MHz antenna can provide data to many devices. Many devices can be configured with an address to listen for in the 433MHz data being sent out. If you can find the bracelets, you can find the hardware required to drive it. Easier to start that direction I should think.
Then you can gut the bracelets and redirect the band’s signals to whatever you want.
The question of spatial localization continues to bug me. Yes, you can blanket an area with lots of RF (think LoRa) which is more than fast enough and probably cheap enough as a freebie to a $100 concert ticket. But if you watch the effects, they can light up areas. This means they know where the individual light-wands are. It’s possible that the individual wands know where they are because they are programmed with a seat code and are put on the seats before the concertgoers arrive. Or every seat has an RFID tag so the wand knows where it is and only responds to commands dedicated to that area – and a little spatial error of +/-1 row or column would not matter in the grand scheme of things. I first thought E1.31 but quickly discarded that. If this is controlled over a DMX system, there is a huge abstraction layer built in to keep the number of universes down. I think this more like an exercise in projection pixel-mapping with software like Watchout or Green Hippo (or any number of others).
It’s not as complected as you think. From memory I think the pixel wands and wristbands are infrared receivers. An infra red moving head camera aims at different parts of the crowd switching on the pixel bands so creating the moving effects. Multiple cameras are linked together and work on different parts of the crowd adding more complex patterns. All controlled by very clever software. Using infrared creates no issues with other RF devices and is relatively cheap and simple to set up.
I have a pixel wristband from the UK Brits awards a few years ago. I’ll see if I can find it and take a look inside.
No telling if it’s the same technology, but I’d be interested to see what’s inside something like that.
I managed to find the pixel wristband issued at the event.
I remember the effects being amazing as I looked across the crowds.
The second pic shows the internal layout. As I thought you can see the IR receiving sensor on the bottom right. All powered by 2x 3v lithium button cells.
For anyone that’s interested, I located the company that uses this technology with a brief video of how their setup works.
For anyone who is interested, I did a little digging.
Someone in our house is a fan. They got an “army bomb” in preparation for a show in the US that ended up being cancelled due to COVID-19. I’m not allowed to disassemble it, but I was able to look at the label in the battery compartment and get the FCC ID and find their certification info.
For some reason the internal photos are embargoed until 10/11, despite the thing being in the wild. However, the test report reveals that it uses…BLE, which I already knew. It doesn’t seem to have another radio, though. I did find internal photos for a similar device, registered in 2016, from the same manufacturer. The markings on the bluetooth SoC aren’t legible in the photos, unfortunately.
I can’t find any real teardowns, but one fan took hers apart. No closeups, but its clear there isn’t an IR receiver anywhere IR could be received.
The company that makes the devices is Fanlight, which I can’t link to because I’m a new user and I’ve already made too many links.
That is terribly cool. I can see there is what looks like a programming interface to the wristband and was thinking that they could program the seating location into it. But then I thought that would simply be too much work and there is no guarantee that people would be in their exact seats. Bombarding the area with IR signals that move is very interesting. But still, how do the individual seats within the beam know to be different from someone 20 seats away? Clearly they have that problem worked out and we can only wonder. Thanks for posting that.
I have a project in mind similar to what’s being discussed here, and I want to build it on top of WLED. I’m planning to use ESP-NOW for the communication. ESP-NOW allows an ESP device to be in AP mode or otherwise not connected to a network, and still receive a broadcast message from the one device that’s setup to send out messages to control the rest (among other use cases).
I added some ESP-NOW code to the WLED Soundreactive fork, and was able to set up two devices, one to broadcast a ~75 byte message containing FFT info at 50Hz, and another to listen for broadcasts and display FFT-based patterns, and it works well at short range with only occasional missed messages. I had to turn off the “Disable WiFi Sleep” option in Wifi Setup for the receiver to get reliable reception.
I plan on sending minimal info over ESP-NOW to the devices - mostly to sync patterns on the devices similar to the existing UDP sync - and having the devices generate the patterns themselves. Imagine a 2D pattern that is the shape of the stadium in the video. If each device knew its approximate position in the stadium (I have some ideas on that, plus the IR idea I wasn’t considering before until reading this thread), each device could compute the full 2D pattern and only display the section appropriate for its position in the 2D map. Of course depending on the pattern it may not need to compute the full pattern, and just the values relevant to what it needs to display.
Next steps for me on this project is to make an ESP-NOW Usermod. I’ll post back when I have more updates.
More ESP-NOW info:
This is directly from the website:
For wireless object control, we use an infrared signal (like a TV remote). It’s fast (20 FPS), affordable, and avoids any interference with existing radio communications. We have different type of controllers to achieve the spatialized effects. Our transmitters are rugged, water resistant and encased in fixed wash or moving head standard lighting fixture casing. They can all be daisy-chained via DMX and installed on your existing rig or catwalk. With our PixMob Moving Head, we’ve broadened the capabilities of this type of effect.
They are using IR to control
Your project sounds very interesting.
Please keep us informed on your progress especially as you are integrating it within Wled.
