WORK IN PROGRESS

The concept for what became the Sabrlux lighting began in 2016.

At the time (and still in some respects to this day) there was very little in terms of high resolution, battery powered, waterproof and wireless lighting fixtures. It seemed like there was a gap in the market at the intersection between lighting, video, wireless & waterproof.

After a few years of making LED lighting effects for events as well as working within the live events industry I wanted to see if I could to take things forward and develop my first refined lighting fixture.

The goals from the beginning were for the fixture to be waterproof, battery powered and wirelessly controlled. The rest was open to the design process.

There have been countless design changes along the way as there was not a clear cut goal in mind at the outset. The project has been a natural progression of playing with different design ideas, implement the test circuits and code, then repeat.

This design method is slow, inefficient, often messy, more expensive… but that didn’t matter. This wasn’t a business endeavour from the outset. It was a personal R&D project to play with different circuit design, wireless technology, CAD design and software development skills. Research was done into so many different areas that now to be honest I can see were never going to be fruitful. But a lot was learned.

The Sabrlux fixtures have had webpage configuration interfaces, infra red remotes, 7 segment displays, repleacable batteries, mains power circuits, AM radio control interfaces, bluetooth interfaces, just to name a few of the ideas played with and then subsequently ditched. I had fun.

The Sabrlux app to manage the fixtures was the first app I had developed for mobile. I wanted it to be as portable as possible and the Xamarin platform seemed like it fitted the bill as the vast majority of the code would build for Android, IOS, Windows 10, Windows phone, MacOS and even XBox and so this was the platform upon which the app was built. I had never used the C# or XAML languages that Xamarin uses and I found that to be a very pleasant experience. The speed and ease with which programs can be written and tested was an eye opener coming from a background in low level C and C++ programming.

I settled on using Espressif’s ESP32 SOC microcontroller as it was a cheap yet incredibly powerful MCU with WiFi and Bluetooth built in. The firmware for this was written in C and C++ using Visual Studio, Visual Micro and the Arduino core libraries for ESP32.

Git was used to keep a track of all the constant changes to the source code of both the app and the firmware and proved invaluable time and time again.

I’m sure any programmer would agree that no software is ever complete. I could continue to add new features and improve the existing features for an eternity (or until the ESP32 ran out of storage or RAM) but I had to call it a day somewhere to allow more time for the other projects I was working on. Having got the app and firmware to a point that was efficient, stable, bug free and easy to use the first batch of 10 Sabrlux fixtures are done for now; ready to see some real world use outside of the electronics lab.

There is very long list of people that have helped and supported me during this project but a special thanks goes out to my partner Odette for putting up with me hiding away in the lab for days on end and helping me to solve many of the problems, often by forcing me to take time out and reflect. She also has a particular skill in showing up all and any remaining bugs within the software.