Aurora Light Controller

Update 6/29/06: New release! I discovered that the alpha-0.1.0 release was not running on other people's machines (opps....).  I have put up a new 0.1.1 release that has a bunch of improvements, but here is the short list:

• Aurora Light Controller should run on computers that don't have the USBDMX.com D2XX driver installed

• There is now much better error handling.  Users will be notified of program errors in a graphical window, and the program should recover from almost all errors.

• The USBDMX.com driver is no longer loaded by default, so people without the controller installed or attached won't even see error messages.  There is now a "Connect to Device" button.

• You can now control where shows and saved and loaded from, in addition to naming the files.

• The .jar release now uses One-JAR to package the driver dll file inside the .jar file, so the program will actually run this time (instead of the last release where I put the .dll inside the jar, but that caused a runtime error).

NOTE: This release contains a new option: AuroraLightController-0.1.1-onejar.jar.  This package uses the one-jar project to package the .dll file with the .jar file.  I found this to work fine overall, but I get some strange error messages when attempting to connect to the USBDMX.com device on computers without the driver installed (instead of the errors I should get).  In my situation, the one-jar appears to work fine, but I also offer AuroraLightController-0.1.1.zip incase you are having problems or getting weird errors with the one-jar release.  The zip file contains the standard program .jar and the .dll file for the USBDMX.com driver.  If you have any wierd problems, please let me know.

Enjoy the new release, and just email me with any comments, problems, bugs, etc!

Rob Smith

About Aurora Light Controller:

Aurora Light Controller is a theater-oriented lighting controller. It is built around cues and conventional fixtures. It currently supports the usbdmx.com controller, but is designed to support additional controllers.  The program is written in Java in an object-oriented fashion.

The current release is stable and should be very functional.  While there are still many features missing, the program is capable of creating cues and transitioning between them, and saving shows.  Therefore, it has all the basic features required for a theater light control program

I now have a basic users guide at the top of the page that I recommend you take a look at.  It will hopefully provide some incite into how to use the program and why things work like they do.  Additionally, the java documentation for the program is now available.  The model and controller portions of the program now have complete Javadoc which you are welcome to take a look at.  There are a variety of TODOs spaced throughout the documentation, varying from minor documentation and code naming updates to major changes I have planned for the program.

If you are interested in this program, would like to help with development, or would just like to comment, please send an email to sinorm [at] gmail com.