Glow with *OUR* Show and MSP430G2553 discussion

Re: Making devices to receive the GWTS/MwM data- I believe the parties involved wanted to master the data being used first so that they would know what it should do.

If there is someone on here that is skilled with documentation it would be great if this topic (all the work surrounding Glow with the Show/Made with Magic) could be gathered up and entered in to the wiki in a more usable fashion as one or many indexed pages.
 
mikeybg said:
So I'm way late to the party here but I have been trying to understand the data protocol used in detail over the past year. I see many captured transmission made by the wands. I also have captured live show data inside the park using my laptop with arduino. I was hoping at least to be able to understand the protocol well enough to know what it is I received. I can fudge with bits, change colors, flash speed, etc. but wanted to see if anyone here was able to fully reverse engineer the protocol?
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Just be careful with that. While I've been recording with my tiny setup I've been watching security or anyone looking a bit too close at what I'm doing. Really don't have to answer the "Sir, what are you doing?" question with "Recording infrared show data? Maybe I'm just skittish about it but I'm not big on drawing attention to myself.

mikeybg said:
I'm looking for the same thing. Not to make ears but something for our daughters stroller for the shows. From reading through all the threads it looks like they have a good handle on the protocol but I can't find a shared worksheet covering known portions.

On my side I know far less than others about the protocol. What I have done is I have an arduino sketch that I can listen to the IR data during a show and in real time it calculates and verifies the checksum (and removes it) giving me a reliable CSV dump. I also have a VB program that reads the csv files in where I can select rows to retransmit to another arduino that calculates/adds the checksum and sends it on the IR. The biggest difference I use on mine regarding the transmission is I use 1 pwm port giving me the 38khz carrier signal and another connected as a serial port so no need for a resistor and I can use a red led in reverse to "see" the data going out when the LED blinks off.
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Most people get to the basic and extended color palette stage and they stop there. There's a few who've gone beyond that but publicly posted notes are spotty.

My recording setup is similar in that it verifies it as it records but I have it pull time and GPS data too. I looked into doing the IR transmission your way too but I wasn't too sure about wiring it up. I'm glad that you got it worked out that way.

mikeybg said:
hmm. my last post didn't go. What I'm trying to do is receive disneys protocol and trigger ws2812 smart pixels with it (like a strip of 16 or so). Once I get home tonight I will sift through what was shared on the disney protocol to see if I can piece enough of it together.
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rjchu said:
Very active thread today. :) I haven't read much since my post earlier but the reindeer hats are Lightmans creation and if memory serves they are his own protocol and NOT compatible with GwtS stuff. Re the other question about Made with Magic and the bow hats and paintbrushes, that's that same protocol as the ear hats.

-Joni-
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mikeybg said:
Everything of what I see is hats being controlled but has anyone successfully emulated a hat that you can throw show data at?
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The "safe" way of doing this is just extending the guts of a GwtS device. You can use a 328P or other chip to take in the 6 LED pins and do some magic to output it to smart pixels. While you could emulate your own hat, there's going to be functions that you don't know how to handle that'll make you stick out. I'm staying away from creating my own emulated devices due to legal issues; I like my AP.

Jrd said:
Re: Making devices to receive the GWTS/MwM data- I believe the parties involved wanted to master the data being used first so that they would know what it should do.

If there is someone on here that is skilled with documentation it would be great if this topic (all the work surrounding Glow with the Show/Made with Magic) could be gathered up and entered in to the wiki in a more usable fashion as one or many indexed pages.
Click to expand...

I have my own personal wiki of notes but I'm moving notes from another place to here right now and it's a little disorganized and I have so many pages I need to write. I'm hoping in July I'll have everything moved and more stuff fleshed out to post it. For right now though, posts for codes for colors, delays, some of the effect codes, and enough of an understanding of the D0 codes.

Super brief version though:
0x24 Simple Reset
0x60-0x6F for simple colors
0x0E 0x[00-1D, 80-9D] for extended palette
0xF1-FF for delays of 100 to 1500 ms.
0x20 Immediate, think of this as 0 ms. delay.
0x48 0x[00-1E, 80-91] for effect codes (as far as I have in my notes)
0x[58-5B] Timer controls
0xD0 0xXX 0xXX for effect modifiers which are dependent on which effect is used. Some D0 modifiers don't need effect codes though and can affect other parts of the device.

Ignore the 55 AA codes, they're for the closed captioning system and an old version of GwtS devices like the 100 years of magic pins.
 
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Just wondering if anyone is still including GWTS output in their displays? I was thinking of adding it in again this year.
 
I'm using a NodeMCU receiving a single E1.31 universe to drive the GWTS ears and it works great. I also figured out fading up and down and have incorporated that. I've been looking for the correct code to fade between two colors but haven't been able to figure that out yet.
 
djred2000 said:
I'm using a NodeMCU receiving a single E1.31 universe to drive the GWTS ears and it works great. I also figured out fading up and down and have incorporated that. I've been looking for the correct code to fade between two colors but haven't been able to figure that out yet.
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Details please?

Thanks,

-Joni-
 
rjchu said:
Details please?

Thanks,

-Joni-
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Here is the code. I tested this on a Wemos D1 R2 and it works great as well. This code uses Materdaddy's GWTS library with a few modifications to adjust the IR pulse timing for the ESP8266. The modified library file is on my github.

The first 6 channels of the E1.31 universe are RGB for each ear. Channel 7 is fade up or down. When channel 7 value is equal to 12 it will send a fade up signal and when channel 7 value is equal to 10 it will send a fade down signal. Channel 8 is fade speed. The lower the value the faster the fade will occur. This fades both ears together. I do all my sequencing in Vixen 3. I patched a single channel device for the fade mode and another for the fade speed. I use the custom value effect to send the values I want to trigger a fade up or down. I set the length of the custom value effect to 0.600 seconds. Color changes still occur when a fade up or down is triggered. Be sure to have a value set in the fade speed channel each time a fade is triggered or it will fade instantly.
 
Hello all,

I'm also looking for that 'special' PERL file IRPlayer.pl to help me round up my testing. Anyone successful in getting a copy of this? Much appreciated!
-Pete
 
Sorry for the late response; this is a spare time project for me.

No fully-baked sketch, but probably the easiest way to get started is with ESPEasy firmware
The IR releases (e.g. ESP_Easy_mega-20190607_normal_IR_ESP8266_4M.bin) contain all the known remote codes from the IRremoteESP8266 library for both receive and transmit. You can send the commands through the web, MQTT, serial, and other interfaces, (e.g. IRSEND,MWM,910E005F). Just flash the firmware, set it up, and go. I haven't had good luck decoding messages on an actual ESP8266, I think because it's just a bit too slow. It picks up either the leading or trailing message in the burst of three that the MWM devices actually send, not the important middle one. If I run the same code on a computer-based receiver, it decodes all three fine, so I'm reasonably confident in the protocol implementation that I wrote :) Transmit seems to work fine, at least, and I suspect that's the part most people are interested in.

You could also pull in the IRremoteESP8266 library directly from the Arduino IDE and roll your own firmware, or base it on that library's example MQTT IR server. I'd be curious to know if this approach does better at decoding since you could make a much tighter firmware by omitting all the other devices supported by ESPEasy.
 
Thanks. I'll give this a try and let you know if I get it to work.

isotope said:
Sorry for the late response; this is a spare time project for me.

No fully-baked sketch, but probably the easiest way to get started is with ESPEasy firmware
The IR releases (e.g. ESP_Easy_mega-20190607_normal_IR_ESP8266_4M.bin) contain all the known remote codes from the IRremoteESP8266 library for both receive and transmit. You can send the commands through the web, MQTT, serial, and other interfaces, (e.g. IRSEND,MWM,910E005F). Just flash the firmware, set it up, and go. I haven't had good luck decoding messages on an actual ESP8266, I think because it's just a bit too slow. It picks up either the leading or trailing message in the burst of three that the MWM devices actually send, not the important middle one. If I run the same code on a computer-based receiver, it decodes all three fine, so I'm reasonably confident in the protocol implementation that I wrote :) Transmit seems to work fine, at least, and I suspect that's the part most people are interested in.

You could also pull in the IRremoteESP8266 library directly from the Arduino IDE and roll your own firmware, or base it on that library's example MQTT IR server. I'd be curious to know if this approach does better at decoding since you could make a much tighter firmware by omitting all the other devices supported by ESPEasy.
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I cracked this a little further if anyone is still interested. I used an Arduino MEGA 2560 to create a DMX to GWTS protocol converter, well really more of a dumb translation. It uses 2 libraries: DMX Serial and IRRemote master (IRRemote has been modified to remove all the mentions of serial to be compatible with DMX Serial) Then a DMX shield on the mega. Using the DMX probe mode, it reads in a packet, and there is a different code set to every value in 1 channel. I have all colors of static, static right, fade in, pulse, blink, and several effects. Then sends those out of a IR Flood (940nm) using a transistor. I also grabbed a few of the other MwM things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?fbcli...yORINOvbuCowNk&v=lE3sR0t9vZQ&feature=youtu.be

I can post the .ino if anyone wants, or a list of all the raw codes.
 
I've wanted to do this for a long time, but I'm not an Arduino programmer. What can we used to broadcast the IR signal wider and farther?
 
iflights said:
I've wanted to do this for a long time, but I'm not an Arduino programmer. What can we used to broadcast the IR signal wider and farther?
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You need some an ir illuminator that uses 940nm like this

CMVision IR130-940 CMVision 940nm Invisible Wide Angle 198pc High Power Small LED IR Illuminator with Free Power Adapter https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XC6Z2DQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_VZSAT0VWGF3JGNJ39Q4F

Also you need to use a transistor circuit and 12v power supply just like you would with an led like this

https://www.hackster.io/najad/12v-rgb-led-with-arduino-fb6c46

(wire it like just one color is the ir illuminator)

I can send you my arduino code and everything you need once I do a write up
 
I would also love to see the write up on this. Thanks to everybody's hard work, whew, just read thru 48 pages of this thread!
 
isotope said:
Necro-posting here, but just in case anybody stumbles onto this thread from searching anew, the IRremoteESP8266 implementation for MWM/GWTS is also available in the full tasmota-ir firmware (https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tasmota-IR/). An easy project for anybody to try out is this IR blaster: https://digiblur.com/wiki/devices/other/Tasmota-Infrared-Remote/
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I haven?t had a Christmas light show since we moved about five years ago so imagine my surprise when I got an email notification for this thread I started over a decade ago! I?ve still got all my GwtS hats and stuff in a box in the garage somewhere and also have a bunch of esp8266?s and esp32?s that I use for various projects (non show related) but I just might have to dig that box of ear hats out and tinker with this since it sounds much more plug and play than where we were years ago when first trying to brute force reverse engineer this and hang an Arduino and IR LEDs off a breadboard above my garage to control ear hats in sync w my lights.

Thank you for the walk down memory lane and keeping this alive!

Joni
 
jstorms said:
So they used the iTach's, but created a more powerful, homemade, IR emitters to get better range. Below is the information that I gave them.

Programming Glow With The Show Ears :

Some notes: https://sites.google.com/site/listentoourlights/home/how-to/glowwiththeshow
GWTS protocol notes: https://sites.google.com/site/listentoourlights/home/how-to/glowwiththeshow/hacking-gw
iTach notes: https://sites.google.com/site/listentoourlights/home/how-to/glowwiththeshow/itach-ip2ir
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Jstorms, I just noticed your sig references Round Rock. We moved to Leander five years ago. If you see this and are still active send me a PM. Would love to check out your show and come blink with it if you?re still broadcasting GwtS IR codes! ;)

Joni
 
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