Interactivity

[perigalacticon]

Hi,

I am fairly new to XLights, I had my first display this year and I was happy with it.  I am amazed at what you can do, as I previously hand-coded effects into ESP8266 Arduinos to make displays previously.  One thing I would like to see is more options for interactions with viewers. 

My show doesn't have a big budget, so not a lot of people stop by to watch so far.  It's more of a nice thing for the neighbors to see.  But there is a school nearby and kids walk by and the neighbors have kids.  I was thinking it would be really nice to have more interaction options for kids to play with. 

One thing I thought of is to have an app that allows observers to interact with the display.  For instance, you could have buttons that initiate different effect sequences and sounds or songs.  You could have buttons that change the color of things to whatever they choose.  In real time.  For small kids it would be like magic.

For instance, how about a screen that shows the house display that lets you "draw" on it with your finger in any sort of color, (maybe a changing color?!) and it shows up on the house as you do it.  Or touching it causes different effects (lightning!  snow!  shockwaves!  smiley faces!).  Could mount a touch screen outside that allows the interaction too.  You could even have voice interaction and all sorts of intelligence built into it.  This is coming from my Arduino experience.  It would be nice to be able to merge the two.  I actually tried to do this with my FastLed set-up using NodeRed and Blink libraries.

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but I think it would be really neat and am willing to work with anyone to develop things like these.  Contact me anytime, I'd be glad to help anyway I can.

[Gilrock]

That's already all available.  You can use xSchedule and configure events that react to inputs or other external triggers including from the web interface.  You can use FPP and also have input triggers if you wire into the GPIO.  If you want to keep using Arduino's instead of what most of the lighting community has been using then you're blazing your own trail.

[perigalacticon]

Do you mean there are Android Apps that will control the light display in real time such as drawing on it and have voice and gesture interaction?

[Gilrock]

No.  I only read 3 paragraphs the post was too long for my attention.  If you want that other stuff start working on it but xLights is just a sequencer its not meant for live show playing and interaction.  xScheduler is what plays shows but they are pre-made sequences and you can trigger things with events.

[keithsw1111]

As Gil says all that ability exists. You can either use the buttons web ui or build your own plugin to do exactly what you want.

[dkulp]

FPP has a plugin that does allow live drawing on a single Matrix model (like a megatree or P5 sign or similar) in real time via a web page.   It's currently not able to do a full "house display" or similar, but that could be expanded to accomplish that.   With the HTTP Virtual Display, all the data that is needed is there.

Both FPP and xSchedule have all kinds of various API's that can be used to trigger various things.   That can be done directly through various REST endpoints (both FPP and xSchedule), GPIO triggers (FPP),  MQTT (both), OSC (xSchedule),  etc...  MQTT is interesting as there are various bridges from things like Alexa and IFTTT and such which could handle some of your ideas.   I know there are various people that have used Alexa to voice control their FPP shows.  For the most part, it's just triggering playlists or effects, but it could be expanded out for other things.