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Simulator: Quickstart

  1. Open the simulator. Enter a name for your space and optionally upload a background image.

  2. Add some lights! Hold your mouse down and drag to decorate. You can repeat to draw multiple shapes, then press Enter to save the group and assign to a channel.

    You can also click the 🤚🏼 icon on the lower toolbar to select lights, move/resize them, reassign channels, or remove by pressing Delete.

Key concepts​

We'll get more into the features later. Right now, want to introduce you to a couple key concepts before we move on to sequencing.

Channels​

lightshowd is a music-first platform. Lights are mapped to channels (which may represent a GPIO pin on a controller), and channels are mapped to ** notes **. A single note can be assigned to multiple channels, or multiple notes can be assigned to a single channel. Up to you.

If you go back to the Space menu button, and click "Configure", you'll see we've set up a few channels for you.

The values under these three columns: "Client", "Channel", and "Note" can all be customized to your liking. A client could be an AC outet box or an ESP controller connected to pixels, each one with a unique id. In a physical setup, the client would connect to the show server, and the server would respond with a message containing the assigned notes for each channel.

For now let's get to sequencing. You can come back this when you are ready to design your show.