DMXControl Convention 2021 the second one - Special No. 5 -

Now it's over, our DMXControl Projects e.V. meeting and everyone has arrived safe at home. So it's time to review the meeting and also to report a bit about the events since the last news.

For Sunday we had not made any big plans, because this time the meeting lasted until Monday, but some club members had to leave already in the course of Sunday. But this does not mean that we did nothing on Sunday. On the one hand there was the release of our Satisfactory video. Since customizable lamps were recently introduced in this game, it was a kind of challenge for us to control them. Thus, a small mod for the game was already written before the meeting. At the meeting, it was improved in some parts and released on Sunday. If you haven't seen the tech demo video yet, here it is:

Another topic, especially in the evening, was the MQTT protocol. This is widely used in the IoT area, for example. For a long time there was the wish to make this protocol also usable in DMXControl 3, for example to be able to read values from intelligent sensors. It happened that we had a small application example here and so a first prototype of such a plugin was implemented without further ado. We got an ESP8266 to send a MQTT message when it received an input signal to one of our servers on the Internet. From there, the signal went on to a DMXControl 3 instance at our site. With this we finally controlled a number of fixtures and by means of another DMXControl 3 instance a small LED matrix. Despite the rather long way (including two transmission paths via the internet) we measured reaction times in the lower three-digit millisecond range. This small techdemo definitly showed the potential, which is why we can now complete and clean up the plugin. Besides that, we continued to work on various parts of our software and hardware projects.

Monday was the big clean-up and departure day. The Werk- und Kulturscheune Loitsche had to be cleaned up again. In addition, the equipment we needed for the video shoots of the marketing team had to be brought back. Afterwards, the long drive home was on the agenda, with the last ones in the south of Germany arriving home around 7 pm. The club meeting recharched the motivation and socializing batteries of all club members. So the meeting was a real success.

Your DMXControl team