At ArKaos, it’s now many years we’re developing software that drives LEDs in a way or another: our media server software MediaMaster and our VJ software GrandVJ are used every day to drive LED fixtures or LED walls, and of course we have the LED Mapper extension which, combined with MediaMaster, creates a very easy solution to map visuals on complex setups of DMX driven LED walls.

However there is still something that makes it too complicated and / or too expensive for anyone to display visuals on LED devices: setup…

Simple LED fixtures rely on the DMX or ArtNet protocol to work, which means many magic numbers to type, multiplying chances that something goes wrong and prevents your little pixels to blink.. On the other hand, big LED wall components come with hardware interfaces facilitating the setup but they are most of the time so expensive that they’re not an option for most performers and clubs.

We’re in 2010 and it should not be science fiction to have a LED device with an Ethernet port that automatically ”says hello” when connected to a media server and then sends its description so the server can immediately use it without any setup. The device would contact MediaMaster and configure itself automagically by explaining its capacities like “I am a LED device with 48 x 12 pixels in 5 bits format of red green blue”.. In other words: Plug’n Play.

And of course, this should be operated by an affordable processor because you don’t want to add a PC behind each device..

Well that’s exactly what our Kling-Net protocol does. The prototype you can see on the video below is built with an inexpensive open-source electronics prototyping platform called Arduino, and as you can see, it just works.. We’ll now fine-tune it some more and decide what we’ll do with this baby.

If you want more technical info about Kling-Net, we have started to document it on a dedicated Wiki. http://www.kling-net.com/