For a project that will be going live in Miami for a Unilever client its going to require multiple LED strips to all be controlled individually from Touch designer. Having only briefly used touch designer in the past I have been working on some experiments to link Touch designer to an Art Net controller to control the individual colours of multiple LED strips.

The complicated part when working with LED strips and Art Net is remembering that Art net is still using the base DMX logic at its core. So in order to control an LED strip with 10 pixels in, requires 30 DMX channels. 1 channel for each Red , Green and Blue colour of the pixel. Added to the complexity is that DMX is limited to 512 channels in what is known as a universe. So when designing any type of installation the number of LED pixels in a strip can only max out at 170 pixels before going into the next universe. This meant careful calculations when designing the final environment to make sure sure we didn’t exceed this number in any strip to make the Touch designer project simple to build and easy to adjust, without the need to split LEDs across universes.

During this testing phase it was clear that the cheap Art Net controllers just wouldn’t be reliable enough or provide enough functionality. After investigation the Advatek controller shown at the bottom was purchased. This is light years ahead of anything else and provided a Network interface to control and configure the device as well as inbuilt testing functions. Making debugging and setup of the final installation far easier.