er-lights

Dynamic lighting control system for escape rooms, combining a dedicated hardware controller with a PC application. The controller drives addressable LED strips and DMX fixtures in real time over Ethernet. The PC application generates animations and provides an HTTP API for control from Node-RED.

Status: Hardware controller — working prototype. PC application — in development (animation engine functional, HTTP API in progress).

  Main PC                          er-lights controller
  ┌────────────────────┐                ┌───────────────────────────┐
  │ er-lights app      │   Ethernet     │                           │
  │                    │ ──────────────→│  LED CH 1 ──→ [LED strip] │
  │ - Animations       │   UDP 5568     │  LED CH 2 ──→ [LED strip] │
  │ - HTTP API         │                │  LED CH 3 ──→ [LED strip] │
  │ - Node-RED control │                │                           │
  └────────────────────┘                │  DMX A ────→ [fixtures]   │
                                        │  DMX B ────→ [fixtures]   │
                                        └───────────────────────────┘

Each LED output has:

• 3.3V → 5V level conversion for reliable signal integrity
• Short-circuit protection on the DATA line

A dedicated network segment or VLAN is recommended for latency-sensitive installations with high LED counts.

The controller accepts two protocols on the same UDP port. The format is auto-detected from the packet header.

Lightweight protocol optimized for LED data. Minimal overhead — a full 480-LED frame is only 1,450 bytes.

Channel mapping: Channels 1–4 → LED outputs.

Standard DMX-over-Ethernet protocol for compatibility with third-party lighting software.

Universe mapping:

The PC application runs on the Main PC (or a dedicated machine over LAN) alongside Node-RED. It generates lighting data and transmits it to the hardware controller over Ethernet.

Capabilities:

• Optimized for low-latency, real-time rendering
• Temporal smoothing to prevent flicker
• Per-channel color calibration (R/G/B gain adjustment)
• Built-in animations (color cycling, chase, fill, procedural effects)
• Custom animations supported

A physical LED strip can be divided into multiple independent segments, each running its own animation.

The software emulates a DMX console, providing full channel-level control. DMX fixtures are configured with named parameters (dimmer, color, pan, tilt, etc.) for intuitive control from Node-RED.

• POST /api/config — load scene configuration
• POST /api/led/segment — set segment state (color, gradient, animation)
• POST /api/led/frame — direct frame update
• POST /api/dmx/fixture — set DMX fixture parameters
• POST /api/dmx/raw — raw DMX channel control