One of my projects recently has been a helpful little lighting control gadget for our church. We use Proclaim to run the announcements/lyrics/presentation, and FaithLife recently added MIDI support for lighting. Well, our lighting laptop is a clanky old netbook, and we don’t care for it (or having someone sitting there to run it), so I decided to see if I could build an interface from Proclaim’s MIDI output to our DMX stream, with an Arduino.
What about wrapping it up in electrical tape as well? My thought is the hot glue doesn’t hold so well, although perhaps the superglue IC + XLR soldered on will be enough if there’s a lot of force (e.g. someone tripping over the cable) on the XLR tail off of it. So there’s still exposed pins on the top side, so a potential source of accidental shorting, although much less dangerous than on the bottom where you hot glued it safe.
2018-01-29 by Russell Graves
With our setup (using the Donnor wireless transmitters), the device sits on the sound/multimedia table, hooked to the laptop on one end, and hooked to a wireless transmitter on the other. There’s really no way to trip on it, and it’s interesting enough that I do occasionally get questions about it. It’s a 5V unit, so I’m just not that worried about it.
I have my suspicious that Donnor is using a NRF24L01 radio in their units, so I might try to build my own compatible transmitter at some point.
2018-02-07 by Ned Funnell
I’ll have to remember this for if our church ever gets lighting more complex than dimmer switches for track lights. We’re just now getting out of the pipe-pointing era with some kind of new software suite- sounds similar but not identical, but I’m not directly involved. I just video the sermons.
Hi!
We are church planters in South America, Bogotá Colombia to be more specific.
We are using proclaim software at our church building and have four lights with DMX control, I bought some Dinner DMX wireless adapters and a DMX to USB converter to run the lights from our computer with Freestyler software. But it would be even better to be able to use the proclaim software.
Could you sell us one of your final adapters?
Do I need to get any other hardware? I’m in the States for 2 more weeks before returning to the Mission Field and would like to take everything we need with me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have all the parts required to build one - I’m missing the differential transmitter chip. I could probably get them, but using it requires someone who can modify the source code to match your lighting setup. If you’ve got someone who can do that, I can certainly look into getting the parts. Assuming supply chains work and shipping is reasonable.
THank you for being willing to help!! I dont have much more time in the States, so I will try to do a software solution using Freestyler and converting the MIDI signals from Proclaim into some kind of DMX signal…. We ll see if it works!
Thanks!!!
I work at a school and teach music technology to children 11-18. I am looking for a cheap but reliable MIDI to DMX device so we can get more out of our LED strips and moving lights (with gobos etc.) and am amazed how technical your church services are in the US. This is my church background (I’m in there hardly visible behind the pew) Easter Day Eucharist: Peterborough Cathedral 1989 (Christopher Gower) - YouTube
If I build your PCB can I use CC#s 0-127 on specific MIDI channels and define DMX Channels for each? I can do the mapping / remapping in software if they are automatically mapped to specific CC#s in the device, or is it purely for receiving programme changes from the Proclaim software?
If I can nail this there will be some very happy musical theatre and music technology students.
It should be well commented, and you can set it up however you want - or ignore my code entirely except as a basic framework and do your own MIDI to DMX translations. The hardware doesn’t care, it’s just a USB-capable Arduino board with a differential driver to go from TTL serial to DMX (RS485).
You’ll modify that code to match your needs, then flash it on the device - it’s a standard Arduino.
