Open World 2026 Light and Projector Show

Open World 2026 needed a centerpiece production that lifted the event beyond what off-the-shelf gear could deliver on the school's budget. I treated the show as a serious engineering project in its own right, owning every layer end-to-end.

MadMapper drove the projector visuals. xLights handled sequenced lighting. Signal routing tied DMX, HDMI, and audio across multiple devices into a single coordinated pipeline.

MadMapper and xLights gave me a known-good pro pipeline; my own hardware filled the gap where the budget couldn't.

The gear available was limited and partly borrowed. To extend the rig past what the budget would have allowed, I designed and built custom ESP32-based DMX controllers using MAX485 transceivers.

Those controllers let me drive additional fixtures and integrate LED hardware that would otherwise have been unsupported or out of reach. Effectively, I extended the rig with my own hardware so the show could scale to what the venue needed.

Tight signal routing across DMX, HDMI, and audio. Frame-accurate sync between lights and visuals to the music. Reliable live operation under event-deadline pressure. All of it improvising around the gear that was actually available rather than the gear I would have specced from scratch.

About a month of iteration on hardware, cue programming, and rehearsals. LLM-assisted coding tools were used throughout the firmware and control work while I retained full ownership of design and behavior.