Hi!
I’ve recently come across the pixelblaze, and it looks like an awesome product. I’ve made a few things before with LEDs, but I really want to try something with 3D mapping, so this seems perfect.
However, one thing I can’t seem to find in the documentation is whether DMX / e1.31 or similar protocols are supported, so that I could use something like xLights to control it.
Any information would be appreciated, thanks!
Pixelblaze does not (unfortunately) support natively DMX / e1.31 / Artnet on any kind of pixel pushing protocols.
This is mostly due to the fact that Pixelblaze is a strong pattern generator, that’s its strength so it’s not really the best choice to drive LED from an external control (like xLights).
You can find much cheaper controllers (like ESP32s running WLED) that will do it in a seamless way, but if you want to switch back to “standalone” controller, you will miss the (superior) Pixelblaze capabilities.
There is a way though: Lightshowpi (and others) integration: sACN/e1.31 proxy
But i never managed to make it work myself, a bit too hard for me at this stage. If you manage let me know i’m extremely interested as I think being able to switch between standalone Pixelblaze and Pixel Pushing (or even control the Pixelblaze internal patterns through DMX) would be amazing.
That’s a shame. I have used WLED in my other projects, but I want to use the 3d mapping that Pixelblaze supports most of the time, then occasionally switch to DMX. It’s a shame there isn’t something in between.
That project is interesting, but does look like a bit of a pain (plus it requires a Pi and mine are in use right now). Maybe in the future though!
I once toyed with the idea of creating a usermod for WLED that would receive expansion board serial data from the pixelblaze and map it to the WLED pixel strip and DMX / e1.31 outputs. You could probably design it to easily switch between PB and WLED pattern generators.