openlights / firesim

FireLight show designer and visualizer

FireSim

FireSim is a GUI for designing lighting installations using addressable LED strips. It can display the output of FireMix, which is useful for developing presets without hardware.

More information on preset development is on the FireMix Page

Installation / Development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python firesim.py demo

Getting Started

FireMix stores information about the current lightshow design in a Scene file (as a JSON dictionary). The scene can have a background image assigned (for reference when designing the show) and contains zero or more fixtures. Each fixture is a set of individually-addressable RGB LEDs arranged in a 1xN grid (i.e. each fixture represents a segment of a strip of RGB LEDs). Pixels are addressed by a tuple of (strand, fixture, pixel), where each strand represents an individual hardware controller, each fixture is a zero-based address along the strand, and each pixel is a zero-based offset along a fixture. Fixtures can have any number of pixels, and strands can have any number of fixtures (in the simulator--in real life, you will be constrained by nuisances such as voltage droop and signal integrity!)

When the scene is unlocked, you can use FireSim to design the lightshow. Use the command buttons on the left to add fixtures, and then drag them around with the mouse. You can drag the control points on the end of the fixture, or the entire fixture. When a fixture is selected by left-clicking (highlighted in blue), you can edit its address and number of pixels using the text boxes on the left. To delete a fixture, middle-click on it twice (it will be highlighted in red the first time to confirm deletion).

FireSim listens on UDP port 3020 for messages from FireMix. At the moment, the network protocol has not been optimized for use over an actual network, so performance will be best if both programs are running on the same machine.

Development is heavily focused on FireMix at the moment, so FireSim still has plenty of quirks. Please report bugs using the GitHub issue tracker if you find them, and feel free to submit pull requests with fixes or enhancements.

firesim's Issues

Switch canvas etc. to use Qt Quick Scene Graph for painting

Right now we are going to use QQuickPaintedItem to ease the burden of porting to Qt 5, but we should really be using the scene graph for performance reasons.

Implement shaders for pixel drawing

Instead of using immediate mode, draw pixels using vertex/fragment shaders. Use appropriate blend mode. Make blur look better (maybe use some algorithm that looks more like the fabric diffuser -- blur radius gets wider with intensity of pixel?)

Rendering performance is unusable on Mac OS X

For some reason Firesim is super slow on OS X. It's not great on Win/Linux but much much faster.

Hovering still sucks

Fixtures can get into a state where they are hard to select by mouse-over (for moving). Usually, the drag handles can still be selected for dragging (but they do not get highlighted). This is usually related to overlapping fixtures, but also tends to happen when new fixtures are first placed in the top left corner.

Support fullscreen sim mode

Load backdrop file

Implement the load backdrop file functionality (re-enable button in GUI)

Scene files need more data

Need to include some more things:

• Extents of the stage
• Name of the scene (needs GUI)
• Room for more metadata

Validate fixture addressing

Life is a lot easier if we can validate the addresses. Most importantly, fixtures on a strand need to have continuous addressing from 0 to N. Strands themselves don't necessarily need to have continuous addressing, since each strand is handled by its own controller. We can save on network overhead if a bulk strand write can leave out the fixture addresses by assuming that they cover a continuous range.

OpenGL rendering of pixel data?

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-scenegraph-openglunderqml-example.html

Nudge fixture with keyboard

When a fixture is selected, you should be able to nudge it around with the arrow keys for fine tuning position.

Remove the concept of fixtures

Just use strands and pixels. Should be able to generate sets of pixels in the GUI like the current fixture approach, though. Should support import coordinates from CSV file or something. Needs to be synchronized with firemix since this is a scene file change.

Setting a fixture to more than 32 fixtures == rendering bug

Pixels are not drawn to entire fixture length

Collect profiling data on OS X and identify points of improvement

Change license to GPLv3 and merge tree into Firemix

License change to GPLv3 to match Firemix
@zbenjamin @underwatercolor are you okay with this?
I also plan to merge the tree into Firemix to coincide with the Py3/PyQt5 cutover, as I plan on doing a complete rewrite of the Firesim GUI code and think it would make sense to share common libraries with Firemix

Constrain angle with shift key

When dragging pixel groups, holding shift should constrain the angle to 45-degree snaps

Hotkey support

Implement hotkeys for all actions

• Open/Save/New
• Global actions (blur, fullscreen, mode)
• Editing actions (insert pixelgroup, etc)

Versioning

Add support for versioning and version info. Add version info to scene file header?

Port to PyQt5 and support Python 3

For Mac OS support and other reasons

Strands drawn in black sometimes aren't updated

Try a fungi preset after a noise preset

Missing GUI functionality after new UI merge

• Add new fixtures
• Edit fixture properties
• Edit scene properties (extents, center, name)
• Edit scene strands? (new feature)

Undo/Redo support

Create application icon

The application needs an icon!

Load scene functionality

You should be able to load a scene (and create a new scene) from within the app.

Scene file creation

Starting FireSim without a scene file argument should prompt to save the scene file. Starting with a scene file argument that does not exist should automatically create the file.

Add pylint CI task and code cleanup

Fix PEP8, windows line endings, and other style issues

Angle snapping

When dragging fixture handles, you should be able to snap to angle increments (45 degrees?) by holding Shift.

Update documentation for Py3 / PyQt5

After Py3/PyQt5 is merged, update docs and requirements.

Linux / Ubuntu 17.04 notes:
Need:
pyqt5-dev-tools
python3-pyqt5
python3-pyqt5.qtquick