LX
BY DOWNLOADING OR USING THE LX SOFTWARE OR ANY PART THEREOF, YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE LX STUDIO SOFTWARE LICENSE AND DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT.
Please note that LX is not open-source software. The license grants permission to use this software freely in non-commercial applications. Commercial use is subject to a total annual revenue limit of $25K on any and all projects associated with the software. If this licensing is obstructive to your needs or you are unclear as to whether your desired use case is compliant, contact me to discuss proprietary licensing: mark@heronarts.com
Overview
LX is a software library for real-time procedural animation, primarily designed for pixel-based LED lighting systems. It is the foundation of the LX Studio application.
The modular engine design contains a variety of components:
- Generic parameter and time-based modulation APIs
- Geometric model and matrix transformations
- MIDI interactivity
- Real-time audio analysis
- Color composition and blending
Output via a variety of lighting protocols is supported, including:
LX differs from many other lighting/VJ software packages in that it is designed to support non-uniform 3D pixel layouts, rather than dense 2D screens. Whereas many applications are capable of video mapping LED pixel arrays, LX functions more like a sparse vertex shader. The rendering engine takes into account the discrete spatial position of each pixel.
GUI
A companion library, P3LX, makes it simple to embed LX in the Processing 3 environment with modular UI controls and simulation, the most typical use case. This core library is kept separate, free of any dependency on the Processing libraries or runtime.
LX Studio is a fully-featured digital lighting workstation with a rich UI for visualization and control.
Headless
LX may be run in headless mode on any Java-enabled device (such as a Raspberry Pi).
cd examples/LXHeadless
ant
./LXHeadless
By default, the provided headless example outputs OPC formatted data via TCP on localhost:7890. This data can be viewed using the emulator that comes with openpixelcontrol as follows...
git clone git://github.com/zestyping/openpixelcontrol.git
cd openpixelcontrol
make
bin/gl_server -l layouts/freespace.json
Alternatively, you could monitor raw network output with netcat: nc -l 7890
Contact and Collaboration
Building a big cool project? I'm probably interested in hearing about it! Want to solicit some help, request new framework features, or just ask a random question? Open an issue on the project or drop me a line: mark@heronarts.com
HERON ARTS MAKES NO WARRANTY, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SOFTWARE.