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About meElectronic engineerLighting designerTechnical writer

I design electronics and embedded software to make things work (or work better).

I have done a lot of DMX lighting designs, including recently a lot of work with LED pixels and also high power LED emitters. For one-off solutions there's often an Arduino board you can buy off the shelf, but I'll often get custom circuit boards made if there isn't something already existing.

Example projects

Touchscreen controller for cameras

This device provides preset position recall for PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras. It also controls the vision mixer software VMix. It's based around an arduino  uno with a USB-HDMI touch screen, controlling a VB.NET software application on a PC.

The case is 3D printed and the vision mix buttons are on a custom made PCB. The arduino reads the buttons and joystick and sends the information back to the PC app over USB, then controls the LEDs in the buttons using a return message from the PC app.

The touchscreen just acts as a normal Windows touch monitor.

Big display using RGB matrix panel

If a big outdoor-viewable display is needed, RGB matrix panels are a good solution. These are made to be mounted onto frames to make LED walls, but you can buy them individually at fairly low cost - often called "HUB75" panels. They are basically a big shift register and can be controlled by a small micro - in this case I used an ESP32 module.

The matrix panel is mounted in a 3D-printed ABS frame which is then inside an IP65 enclosure for weatherproofing. The resolution of the display is 64x32