51
Kimmax
7y

Since I was little I was fascinated by club light shows I saw on TV shows. I just couldn't find out how they made light react to sound, which were two completely unrelated things to me back then. But I wasn't dumb and somehow figured out that if I hooked some low energy fairy lights to my amp and turned the bass up, they would lightup to the beat.
3 fried fairy lights and angry parents for to loud music later I swore to myself that I would someday build something that could light up my whole room and react to the music I was playing.

I started coding about the age 13 (turned 20 a month ago) with some old school bat scripts. But I wanted something that would generate a .exe so I googled and ended up installing Visual Studio Express (again angry parents for installing without asking) and started copying my first VB.Net program together. From there no one could stop me. I wanted to archive something with an application and googled until I found what I needed and learned to code this way.
I learned writing decent vb.net code and itvwas about this time I came into contact with IRC. I lurked arround there and this is were I came into contact with Linix servers, because I wanted to code IRC (eggdrop) bots, so I learned TCL and got used to Linux. Time passed and I ended uo being a Global OP on some network back then.

I did go further, coded Minecraft Mods, thus Java, changed back to C#, learned PHP and started setting things up on my VPS, Mails server, web server, etc.

Nowadays I work as a Systemadmin / Developer Hybrid, earning my first real money doing what I love to do and guess what? In the meantime I proved myself I can accomplish what I wanted as kid. I bought some Club LED DMX capital lights and programmed a controller for them which can control them in C#, but in a way I can run it on my raspi using mono. I also coded a client which runs on windows which uses some native libraries to calculate the dominant color of the shown picture in realtime (Handels 24fps 1080p) and uses the lights as ambient light, like you see them behind TVs sometimes.
The same app uses Bass.NET and an algorithm to dedect a beat in realtime and switches the light colors. Exactly what I wanted as akid, but better.

I can even control the lights via the new Google Assistant and/or Tasker.

Feels fcking good.

Some of my work lies on github among other, mostly trash: https://github.com/Kimmax - didn't updated there in a while tho.

I plan on writing a new free opensource plugin based modular home automatication server and pretty sure could use some helping hands..

I don't know why I wrote all this, just felt like it.
Also: first Rant

Please don't kill me for errors in the text, I'm to lazy to read through it again right now :P

Comments
  • 9
    Great - we can't edit after 5 minutes. Now I look even better, spelling Linux and tons of other stuff wrong ;)
  • 0
    Impressed! Good job with your goal.
  • 3
    Nice. And i always thought that on tv there was actually a guy sitting there programming the lights real time
  • 4
    @DarkMukke Thats what I thought too. Thought preprogrammed shiws would be boring and a real time algorithm would be much cooler
  • 3
  • 0
    @Kimmax cool so for the 2 years i worked as a light technician on festivals, i was just and over payed, over educated, light monkey, hitting random buttons, while the computer was doing all the work ?

    so these are computers generating random light movement effects by listening to the music ?
    https://youtu.be/fN1Gw8PHkAI
    https://youtu.be/-ebkbCIEXoo
  • 4
    @DarkMukke of course not.
    I like the preprogrammed shows and think you could call it art. The amount of creativity that is put into this shows sometimes is just nuts.
    I was disappointed because I thought the lights would mange them all by themselves, autark (I was about 13/14 at this time), so this is what I wanted to archive and did.

    Of course you can't beat a show made by a professional with a simple algorithm, but that wasn't what I wanted to do
  • 1
    @LastDigitOfPi either you know because you see the lights flashing out my windows like I host the Oscar's, or because you saw my github profile. I like to believe #1 :D
Add Comment