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Sparkle Motion¹ is the system used to control the lights onBAAAHS, but it'sdesigned so it could be applied to pretty much any lighting project. It includes a browser-basedlight show designer and performance interface, 3D light mapping, IP-based control protocol, andcustom LED control hardware and firmware. We designed it all pretty much from scratch, becausewe're nerds. We hope you'll have some fun with it and maybe find it useful.

The Sparkle MotionSimulator	BAAAHS at Black Rock City, 2019

tl;dr:

Shows are built out of small scripts called shaders, which are written inGLSL. Lots ofawesomefree shaders anddevtools already exist on the internet. In the show designer, you can create orimport shaders, and attach them to buttons or sliders in a customizable performance UI. Shaders can becombined in interesting ways to create new effects. You can make shows reactive to the environment byconnecting external sensor data—like a beat detector, midi controller, sound spectral analysis, or awebcam—to shader variables.

Sparkle Motion can control LED strips using industry-standardsACN(or with our custom IP protocol), and Sharpy-style moving headsover DMX, but it could be extended to control pretty much any kind of device. Lights can be mapped to a3D model using computer vision. Individual lighting fixtures, or groups of fixtures, can be controlledseparately. All types of lights are controlled using the same language and idioms.

On the hardware side, Sparkle Motion includes specs for an ESP32-based controller which you could build(orbuy from us!) managing WS2812-family LEDs, which is controlled overEthernet or WiFi.

Ashow is a collection of shaders, attached to UI elements, which can be arbitrarily combined and made reactive to theenvironment using sensors,

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Sparkle Motion shows may be designed with a specific model and display fixtures in mind, but most shows can be applied to any model and fixtures.

To facilitate this, Sparkle Motion separates configuration of scene elements (the physical model and fixtures) from visuals and the performance interface.

Note that in some cases a single controller may control multiple fixtures. Commonly, a physical DMX USB dongle may havemultiple moving heads attached. It's possible (but less common) for a single brain or WLED controller to be attached tomultiple physical lighting fixtures.

Also, it's possible for a DMX controller to manage multiple DMX universes, e.g. in the case of a WLED controllermanaging more than 170 pixels.

ERD:

Driver <->* Controller <->* Fixture <->? Entity *<--> Model

A fixture may beidentified oranomnymous.

Identified fixtures are associated with an entity in the model, and therefore have a known position and geometry.

Anonymous fixtures are mostly for stuff like bikers-by. They are randomly placed within the model. Pixel arrays are assumed to be linear.

Sparkle Motion's mapper lets you detect arbitrarily-placed lights on a 2D or 3D model using just a cameraconnected to a laptop.

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More here.

The entire system can be run within a web browser in simulation mode (here!). Every component is modeled in softwareso you can see how it will behave in the real world.

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• Show API (outdated)
• API docs (outdated)

1. InstallJava
   • If using an arm64 mac, DMX device support for the native build of sparklemotion requires an x86 jdk which can bedownloadedhere.
   • Make sure to pick a JDK < version 20 asgradle does not currentlysupportit.
2. Open as a gradle project withIntelliJ

In simulator mode, most of Sparkle Motion runs within a web browser.

Run this in a shell window; a browser window will open with the simulator:

./gradlew --continuous jsRun

In production mode, Sparkle Motion runs in a JVM process and talks to real hardware.

To start it, run:

./gradlew run

If you don't have a Brain running locally, do this too:

./gradlew runBrainJvm

When running in this mode you should be able to access the UI athttp://localhost:8004

To build the production minified js package run:

./gradlew jsBrowserWebpack

Continuous build here:https://circleci.com/gh/baaahs/sparklemotion

Passing builds are automatically deployed here:https://baaahs.github.io/sparklemotion