Hosting Your Own PixMob Party Made Easy

Over the last few years, it’s been increasingly common for concertgoers to be handed a light-up bracelet from PixMob that synchronizes with the others in the crowd to turn the entire audience into a music visualizer. They’re a clever way of enhancing the concert experience, but unfortunately, they don’t do anything once you leave the show. Or at least, that used to be the case.

We’ve seen efforts to reverse engineer the IR (and occasionally radio) signals that drive these PixMob devices, but since we checked in last it seems like things have gotten a lot easier for the home gamer. [David Pride] has recently posted a brief write-up that shows how quickly and easily it is to get these devices fired up using nothing more exotic than an Arduino, an IR LED, and an audio sensor module.

With the audio sensor module connected to the Arduino’s digital input and the IR LED wired to digital out, all you need to do is flash firmware to the board and start playing some beats. The source code [David] has provided is a a remixed version of what’s previously been published by [Carlos Ganoza], which, in this case, has been tweaked to make the lighting patterns less random.

Presumably, this is to make the devices behave more like they do during an actual concert, but since nobody at Hackaday is cool enough to have seen a live musical performance in the last decade, we’re not really sure. All we can say is that the effect looks pretty sweet in the demo video.

Back in 2019, we saw a teardown of an early PixMob device, and by 2022, the efforts to reverse engineer their IR control protocol were well underway. We’re glad to see things have progressed to the point that you can piece together a transmitter from what’s in the parts bin, as it means at least some of these devices will have a lifespan longer than a single concert.

Exploring The Tech Behind Concert LED Wristbands

LED wristbands are now a common feature of large arena concerts and events, with a variety of capabilities and technical implementations. In the video after the break, Wall Street Journal does a fascinating deep dive into these wearable light shows.

The three main control technologies are IR light, RF radios, and Bluetooth. The IR-controlled ones are the simplest, and we’ve covered a teardown, a reverse engineering effort and reflash of the Pixmob IR armbands.

Finally, we get a good behind-the-scenes look at how they are controlled. Using pan-tilt IR emitters mounted on lighting towers, the operators can sweep across the audience controlling color and light levels or activating pre-programmed sequences.

The full control setup for RF wristbands, with transmitter on the left.
The full control setup for RF wristbands, with transmitter on the left.

RF armbands have the simplest control setup, only requiring a single portable transmitter connected to a computer running the control software. It does however require some pre-planning for more complex light displays, to ensure each section of the audience is individually addressable.

The most advanced and expensive versions are handheld light sticks controlled via Bluetooth from an app on the users smartphone, and are popular at K-Pop concerts. Each device is linked to the users seat number, making them individually addressable and allowing the lighting operators to produce complex patterns, and even text, in the crowd.

While each of these devices is simple and underwhelming on its own, tens of thousands working together produce impressive effects and probably hide some hard-earned engineering experience.

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Hackaday Links: May 7, 2023

More fallout for SpaceX this week after their Starship launch attempt, but of the legal kind rather than concrete and rebar. A handful of environmental groups filed the suit, alleging that the launch generated “intense heat, noise, and light that adversely affects surrounding habitat areas and communities, which included designated critical habitat for federally protected species as well as National Wildlife Refuge and State Park lands,” in addition to “scatter[ing] debris and ash over a large area.”

Specifics of this energetic launch aside, we always wondered about the choice of Boca Chica for a launch facility. Yes, it has all the obvious advantages, like a large body of water directly to the east and being at a relatively low latitude. But the whole area is a wildlife sanctuary, and from what we understand there are still people living pretty close to the launch facility. Then again, you could pretty much say the same thing about the Cape Canaveral and Cape Kennedy complex, which probably couldn’t be built today. Amazing how a Space Race will grease the wheels of progress.

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Lighting Tech Dives Into The Guts Of Laser Galvanometers

There’s something magical about a laser light show. Watching that intense beam of light flit back and forth to make shapes and patterns, some of them even animated, is pretty neat. It leaves those of us with a technical bent wondering just exactly how the beam is manipulated that fast.

Wonder no more as [Zenodilodon], a working concert laser tech with a deep junk bin, dives into the innards of closed-loop galvanometers, which lie at the heart of laser light shows. Galvos are closely related to moving-coil analog meters, which use the magnetic field of a coil to deflect a needle against spring force to measure current. Laser galvos, on the other hand, are optimized to move a lightweight mirror back and forth, by tiny amounts but very rapidly, to achieve the deflection needed to trace out shapes.

As [Zeno] explains in his teardown of some galvos that have seen better days, this means using a very low-mass permanent magnet armature surrounded by coils. The armature is connected to the mirror on one end, and a sensor on the other to provide positional feedback. We found this part fascinating; it hadn’t occurred to us that laser galvos would benefit from closed-loop control. And the fact that a tiny wiggling vane can modulate light from an IR LED enough to generate a control signal is pretty cool too.

The video below may be a bit long, but it’s an interesting glimpse into the day-to-day life of a lighting tech. It puts a little perspective on some of the laser projection projects we’ve seen, like this giant Asteroids game.

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The Hot And Cold Of Balanced Audio

A few summers of my misspent youth found me working at an outdoor concert venue on the local crew. The local crew helps the show’s technicians — don’t call them roadies; they hate that — put up the show. You unpack the trucks, put up the lights, fly the sound system, help run the show, and put it all back in the trucks at the end. It was grueling work, but a lot of fun, and I got to meet people with names like “Mister Dog Vomit.”

One of the things I most remember about the load-in process was running the snakes. The snakes are fat bundles of cables, one for audio and one for lighting, that run from the stage to the consoles out in the house. The bigger the snakes, the bigger the show. It always impressed me that the audio snake, something like 50 yards long, was able to carry all those low-level signals without picking up interference from the AC thrumming through the lighting snake running right alongside it, while my stereo at home would pick up hum from the three-foot long RCA cable between the turntable and the preamp.

I asked one of the audio techs about that during one show, and he held up the end of the snake where all the cables break out into separate connectors. The chunky silver plugs clinked together as he gave his two-word answer before going back to patching in the console: “Balanced audio.”

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Musical Tesla Concert Is Electrifying

musical_tesla_coil

Hackaday reader [Tyler Laseter] wrote in to tell us about an event that he and his fellow Tesla Orchestra team members are hosting next month.

The “Open Spark Project” is a concert event taking place on May 14th, which melds together electricity and music in spectacular fashion. The event features two large Tesla coils which are tuned to play musical notes while shooting bolts of electricity through the air.

Musical Tesla coils are nothing new around here, but we have yet to see someone allow the general public to play music on their coils. That’s what makes this event unique – anyone is encouraged to submit their to the Tesla Orchestra team, which will then be played back via a live video stream next month. Their web site offers up all of the technical details as well as the file format requirements for submitting music for the event, so get started on your entry today!

If a passive approach is more your style, stick around for a quick video demonstrating their coils’ abilities. Sure it’s Lady Gaga, but we won’t tell anyone you watched it. Plus, it’s totally legit when the song is being played using 20,000 volts.

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Arduino Solenoid Concert

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_hiz-Kx0kM]

[jay] reminded us of this old video of solenoids banging rhythms on furniture and household objects. There’s no schematic, but in the video it looks like an Arduino drives a bunch of solenoids through relays. The PC interface is run on Pure Data, an open source programming environment for audio, video, and graphic processing. Thanks [Jay].