Running show from PC and adding pixels

J

JohnByrne

New member
Calling all Renard users who run both AC and Pixels

Been awhile since I ran my all AC christmas show via Xmus16 boards. What is the school of thought about how to run the show these days ... from a PC like the old days or a new show controller (i.e. Kulp, Falcon, etc)?

I suspect most use the latter these days but I'm leaning to the PC given that's what I am comfortable with and to help this year's budget. If I go PC I think I like the idea of using ESPixelSticks (have 2 in hand to play with). To be clear, I like the idea of a show controller but my budget will be tight so wondering if using the PC this year would be a mistake? Can I be successful with the PC / ESPixelStick this year and upgrade to say a Kulp next year or will I regret that? Open to any suggestion and thank you in advance.

John
 
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I can say that I am 100% Renard with no pixels and this year we used FPP on a Raspberry Pi 3 for the first time instead of using a Desktop and Vixen 2.1. It was a great experience, absolutely no issues, the display looked great, and we won't be going back to the Desktop setup anymore.
 
I also use a Raspberry Pi 3 and it works great! When I used to use a PC it could be spotty at times and required restarts but the pi has not failed once; just my two cents.
 
I never had a lock up PC issue but I've read about them. I used a very clean install XP setup and this time will be Windows 10. Soooo there is that unknown. BUT if I can make the PC work reliably I should have the budget to increase the mega tree size. Darn these pixels are expensive ha ha. No more 100 strings for 50 cents after christmas. And oh by the way my daughter graduates college in May and I know there will be lots of new expenses as we help her get going.

I'd love to hear some input from a "traditionalist" who is still using a PC but integrates pixels into the AC show.


On a side note, are incandescent Christmas lights part of the lighting ban meaning none will be sold after August? I can't find anything about it online anywhere.
 
rPI + FPP software to run my show for the past 6 years. Mix of Renard and Falcon controllers. Recently added ESP32 controllers.
 
JohnByrne said:
On a side note, are incandescent Christmas lights part of the lighting ban meaning none will be sold after August? I can't find anything about it online anywhere.
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No, The ban is centered around general purpose bulbs. Many types of bulbs are excluded including the following:

(1) Appliance lamps;

(2) Black light lamps;

(3) Bug lamps;

(4) Colored lamps;

(5) G shape lamps with a diameter of 5 inches or more as defined in ANSI C79.1-2002 (incorporated by reference; see 10 CFR 430.3);

(6) General service fluorescent lamps;

(7) High intensity discharge lamps;

(8) Infrared lamps;

(9) J, JC, JCD, JCS, JCV, JCX, JD, JS, and JT shape lamps that do not have Edison screw bases;

(10) Lamps that have a wedge base or prefocus base;

(11) Left-hand thread lamps;

(12) Marine lamps;

(13) Marine signal service lamps;

(14) Mine service lamps;

(15) MR shape lamps that have a first number symbol equal to 16 (diameter equal to 2 inches) as defined in ANSI C79.1-2002 (incorporated by reference; see 10 CFR 430.3), operate at 12 volts, and have a lumen output greater than or equal to 800;

(16) Other fluorescent lamps;

(17) Plant light lamps;

(18) R20 short lamps;

(19) Reflector lamps (as defined in this section) that have a first number symbol less than 16 (diameter less than 2 inches) as defined in ANSI C79.1-2002 (incorporated by reference; see 10 CFR 430.3) and that do not have E26/E24, E26d, E26/50x39, E26/53x39, E29/28, E29/53x39, E39, E39d, EP39, or EX39 bases;

(20) S shape or G shape lamps that have a first number symbol less than or equal to 12.5 (diameter less than or equal to 1.5625 inches) as defined in ANSI C79.1-2002 (incorporated by reference; see 10 CFR 430.3);

(21) Sign service lamps;

(22) Silver bowl lamps;

(23) Showcase lamps;

(24) Specialty MR lamps;

(25) T-shape lamps that have a first number symbol less than or equal to 8 (diameter less than or equal to 1 inch) as defined in ANSI C79.1-2002 (incorporated by reference; see 10 CFR 430.3), nominal overall length less than 12 inches, and that are not compact fluorescent lamps (as defined in this section);

(26) Traffic signal lamps.
 
I still use a PC to run my show. My show is a mix of pixels, AC LED light strings and DMX moving heads. I have about ~30 controllers. The AC controllers are custom home built, the pixel controllers are Sans Devices. I run my show at a 50ms update interval in Vixen but it might be possible to run it at a faster refresh rate.

I am prototyping a new player approach, that leverages Vixen's existing support for exporting FPP fseq flat files. If things go as planned it would be an option in the Vixen Scheduler that would provide high performance deterministic show experience. The concept I am trying to achieve is that the Vixen user would define their show and behind the scenes the flat files would be produced. The Vixen Scheduler would no longer be rendering the sequences on the fly. They would already be rendered in cached flat files. One feature I am interested in incorporating is the ability to update a sequence during the show and have the Vixen scheduler automatically incorporate it the next time the show gets to that sequence.

I think running a show on a PC is still a viable option.
 
LOL darn you are far more advanced than me but in my defense I'm a Mechanical Engineer so some may find it amazing that I can figure out how to plug an extension cord into the wall ha ha. Thank you for the info. I'm going to play with these ESPixelSticks and see if I can make them work. Sure would save me a ton of money this year if it will be stable in Windows 10.
 
John,

I am running 64 channels of AC using Renards and Pixels for the rest of my display. I too use a Raspberry Pi with FPP as my main show computer and 9 more RPi's as Remote FPP devices. RPi's have been difficult/expensive to purchase over the last couple of years, but when they are readily available they are MUCH less expensive than the Falcon or Kulp controllers. I use so many devices as I like to keep the controller and Power Supply close to my props and only run power cord across my yard. That way if I have a problem with a controller or PS I only lose a limited number of props and I can easily detach/fix/reattach to get them back up and running.

Using a PC as your show computer should not be an issue, particularly if you are attaching an Access Point and running your pixels from ESPixelSticks, but there is an issue with LAG if you are pushing out all of the information to the Pixelsticks wirelessly rather than using a FPP Master/Remote system, which I am not sure you can do from a PC.
 
Wireless controllers bring throughput issues into the mix. I believe you can run FPP on a Windows machine using a docker image but that add some complexity to the setup. In theory that would allow you to take advantage of all the advanced FPP features.
 
JohnByrne said:
LOL darn you are far more advanced than me but in my defense I'm a Mechanical Engineer so some may find it amazing that I can figure out how to plug an extension cord into the wall ha ha. Thank you for the info. I'm going to play with these ESPixelSticks and see if I can make them work. Sure would save me a ton of money this year if it will be stable in Windows 10.
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The use of ESPixelSticks has nothing to do with which version of Windows you are using or for that matter what type of show player you are using (Vixen, xLights, FPP are all common show players). ESPixelStick V4 supports running as an FPP Remote so a show player that outputs FPP Remote synch messages is all you need. Using FPP Remote mode lets you add an infinite (ok limited by the capacity of your AP) number of ESPs. Adding more ESPs in an FPP remote mode does NOT increase the network bandwidth used and does not increase the WiFi lag.
 
Lots of good info for sure. Researching some say PC = lag others so no and yet others say yes even if used through a show board. I suspect the basis for the varied experiences is tied to the varied equipment being used and possible wifi congestion in some areas???

I've made the decision to setup the pixel sticks and see how it does via a show PC and Vixen / Xlights scheduler. What I don't have a grasp is how many pixels could impact the lag or if a pixel increase does impact lag (I'd assume yes). I only have a couple of strands at the moment so I could test 2 PixelSticks each having on strand (a 50 and a 100) on each. Just trying to get a really good grasp on this now since I have plenty of time still ... well actually I don't .. we know how that goes right? lol
 
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JohnByrne said:
Lots of good info for sure. Researching some say PC = lag others so no and yet others say yes even if used through a show board. I suspect the basis for the varied experiences is tied to the varied equipment being used and possible wifi congestion in some areas???

I've made the decision to setup the pixel sticks and see how it does via a show PC and Vixen / Xlights scheduler. What I don't have a grasp is how many pixels could impact the lag or if a pixel increase does impact lag (I'd assume yes). I only have a couple of strands at the moment so I could test 2 PixelSticks each having on strand (a 50 and a 100) on each. Just trying to get a really good grasp on this now since I have plenty of time still ... well actually I don't .. we know how that goes right? lol
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As with everything else, if you are using FPP Remote then the number of pixels and the number of Controllers in FPP Remote mode does not matter. Each of those controllers is playing the sequence data from a file that is local to that device. The sync message is very small and is sent using a broadcast message. The FPP Master typically sends one sync message per frame but is allowed to send fewer messages. This means that in an FPP remote network there are up to 40 sync messages per second.

If you use DDP, then the data for every frame is transmitted from the show player to every controller in the network. DDP is much more efficient in the use of network resources than E1.31, but the big thing is that every pixel uses three bytes of network bandwidth 40 times a second. This is what causes the network load to go up as the number of pixels / channels go up.

So you have a choice in how you move forward AND you can mix & match these technologies on a single network.
 
MartinMueller2003 said:
As with everything else, if you are using FPP Remote then the number of pixels and the number of Controllers in FPP Remote mode does not matter. Each of those controllers is playing the sequence data from a file that is local to that device. The sync message is very small and is sent using a broadcast message. The FPP Master typically sends one sync message per frame but is allowed to send fewer messages. This means that in an FPP remote network there are up to 40 sync messages per second.

If you use DDP, then the data for every frame is transmitted from the show player to every controller in the network. DDP is much more efficient in the use of network resources than E1.31, but the big thing is that every pixel uses three bytes of network bandwidth 40 times a second. This is what causes the network load to go up as the number of pixels / channels go up.

So you have a choice in how you move forward AND you can mix & match these technologies on a single network.
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Martin,

How would one go about using PixelSticks as remotes and a PC as the main show player?
 
Question so I can understand, when using a show player running from a device like a Kulp or Falcon, do you put the SD card with show files on not only the main FPP show player device but also cards with the sequence files on the remote devices?
 
JohnByrne said:
Question so I can understand, when using a show player running from a device like a Kulp or Falcon, do you put the SD card with show files on not only the main FPP show player device but also cards with the sequence files on the remote devices?
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Correct. Part of being able to work as an "FPP Remote" means that the sequence channel information is stored on a local SD card in an fseq file with the same name and header information as that of the files on the FPP Master.

WARNING: The ESPixelStick V4 fseq files are what is called a "sparse fseq". The file on each ESP has only the channel data needed by that specific ESP. This means that if you have 30 ESPs running in FPP Remote mode then you have 30 unique fseq files. In addition, you have the comprehensive fseq that gets installed on the FPP Master.

Vixen and xLights have no problems creating these files.
 
Thanks. I didn't realize till now about the SD cards but that sure clears up why it needs less data bandwidth. I never could wrap my head around that one. Love this forum!

Funny thing is as soon as I come to grips with one piece of this learning curve puzzle, yet another hole in the puzzle appears. In this case is how to use V4 ESPixelSticks as a show master and still control serial Renard boards. I'd need more hardware somewhere and at some point one realizes that the rabbit hole is getting too deep.

Darn it, guys I'm just going to bite the bullet and get what I know I should get ... Kulp K16A-B board with Beaglebone and be done with it. The more I read about this setup the more I like it. Darn it, why did I ever decide to get back into this hobby ha ha ha ah
 
you cannot use esp v4 as an fpp master. it only supports fpp remote mode. your show player is the fpp master. i use an rpi as my fpp master.
 
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