Gonzo LED strip lighting controller, driven from video output that's easy to program.
The hardware is in three parts:
- Medusa Cape: BeagleBone Black cape that snoops the LCD video output of the BeagleBone and picks off RGB pixel values. Those values are mapped to LED pixels on one of 32 WS2811/WS2812 LED strips of up to 512 LEDs each.
- Medusa TX32: A 32-channel RS-422 transmitter board that sends 4 pairs of RS-422 signalling out of each of eight RJ-45 connectors. Common CAT5/6 Ethernet cabling (TIA-568B) can be used to connect up to four strips on each cable.
- Medusa RX2: A 2-channel RS-422 receiver board that picks off two channels of RS-422 on a cable, and passes the two remaining signals out another cable (so two 2-channel receivers can be chained to use all four channels on a single Ethernet cable).
For developing this project, the following tools were used:
- Schematic capture and PCB layout: KiCAD -testing branch, builds from late September or early October 2013
- FPGA development and bitstream generation: Altera Quartus II 13.0 SP 1 FPGA development environment, for Windows or Linux
- BeagleBone Linux distribution: Angstrom, September 4, 2013
- Python 2.7
The associated software is provided under a GPLv2 license:
Copyright (C) 2013 Jared Boone, ShareBrained Technology, Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
Jared Boone jared@sharebrained.com
ShareBrained Technology, Inc.
The latest version of this repository can be found at https://github.com/sharebrained/medusa