History

The Open Lighting Project began as a university project. In 2004, as a student at the University of Western Australia, Simon Newton was required to complete a year long software engineering project. DMX over IP protocols were starting to see adaption so Simon focused on the ArtNet protocol, since it was the only publicly available protocol at the time.. Simon wrote libartnet, a Linux implementation of the ArtNet lighting control protocol and since it was the first Open Source implementation of an IP based lighting control protocol,  libartnet was used in venues around the world.

Recognizing a need for Open Source software within the industry, Simon founded the Open Lighting Project in 2005 and began work on the Open Lighting Architecture. The project grew and has spawned sub-projects to meet the needs of the industry.

Open Lighting Embedded is Announced

October 7, 2015

OLP announces an open source DMX/RDM stack for PIC32. The Number1 hardware is made available through Stellascapes.

Open Lighting Project joins the Free Software Support Network

October 5, 2015

OLP joined http://freesoftwaresupport.org/ , and in doing so obtained 501 (c)(3) status.

Debian Jessie release includes OLA

August 26, 2015

OLA Trademark Established

December 23, 2014

A registered trademark is granted for the OLA logo.

Google Summer of Code, doubling up for 2014

April 21, 2014

We’ve doubled our number of GSOC projects for 2014! Jesse Anderson  is working on a touchscreen interface for the Raspberry Pi, while Lukas Erlinghagen  is working on porting OLA to Windows.

Open Lighting Project at linux.conf.au 2014

January 9, 2014

Simon presented a talk on the Open Lighting Project at linux.conf.au 2014. The talk can be viewed on YouTube.

Open Lighting Project Repositories move to GitHub

December 24, 2013

As the project grew, the previous hosting site didn’t have the features we required. We moved over to GitHub and haven’t looked back.

Lighting and Sound International covers the Open Lighting Architecture

September 1, 2013

See Lighting And Sound International (LSI), September 2013 Edition.

#openlighting IRC channel created

February 3, 2013

The project’s official IRC channel was created on freenode: irc://freenode.net/openlighting

First OLA image released for Raspberry Pi

July 18, 2012

OLA Raspberry Pi

OLA featured in Linux Journal

December 1, 2011

The December 2011 Issue of Linux Journal featured OLA.

OLA is added to MacPorts

June 21, 2011

RDM Responder Tests released

February 19, 2011

rdm.openlighting.org site launched

January 19, 2011

http://rdm.openlighting.org/

Initial support for E1.31 (Streaming ACN) added to OLA

October 26, 2010

OLA 0.8.0 adds RDM support

August 7, 2010

Arduino RGB Mixer is released

February 7, 2010

See Arduino RGB Mixer.

Simon attends his first CPWG meeting & plugfest in Dallas

January 23, 2010

http://tsp.plasa.org/tsp/working_groups/CP/docs/CPmin01-2010w.pdf This influenced the direction of OLA as the majority of the equipment and  effort at the plugfest was focused on RDM, rather than ACN.

openlighting.org registered

January 10, 2010

The new domain represents the shift in the project beyond just DMX512.

Initial support for E1.31 (Streaming ACN) added to OLA

October 26, 2009

OLA 0.3.0 released

August 8, 2009

OLA was almost entirely re-written for the 0.3.0 release. The RPC system was changed to use protocol buffers and a new  web interface was introduced built on ctemplate. For the first time the patching of port to universes was persistent across restarts. This release adds the Python

LLA renamed to OLA

July 28, 2009

To reflect the fact that LLA now ran on more than Linux, the project was renamed to OLA (Open Lighting Architecture). As part of the rebranding the mailing list address changed to [email protected].

First post to the linux-lighting mailing list

July 21, 2008

The first message was a simple project status update.

LLA 0.2.0 Released

January 1, 2007

0.2.0 had support for SandNet and the Open DMX USB. It also supported basic universe merging. It was quickly followed by 0.2.1 which added Pathport and support for the StageProfi widgets.

libartnet-1.0.6 adds support for ArtNet II

November 3, 2006

ESTA Manufacturer ID assigned

April 18, 2006

The code is 0x7A70 or ‘zp’ in ASCII. The initials are from Simon’s Dog.

opendmx.net is registered

April 6, 2006

The plan was to run a wiki documenting Open Source and DIY lighting software.

libartnet 1.0.0 released

March 30, 2006

Initial commit of LLA

August 25, 2005

The first commit to the LLA repo is 730489abbc3de7127264a48fab30e145ec107be4. It includes an ArtNet and ESP Net plugin.

Simon emails the QLC list announcing an ArtNet Plugin

April 28, 2005

I’ve made an ArtNet out plugin, it’s available from http://www.nomis52.net/data/artnet/qlc/ It requires libartnet which is here: http://www.nomis52.net/data/artnet/libartnet/ If anyone uses it let me know how it goes. I just hacked it up quickly as a proof-of-concept type thing. It should really have some more options in the settings window such as which universe to output data on and the like

libartnet 0.1.9 adds support for OS X

April 18, 2005

First working version of the Netgear wireless ArtNet node

March 1, 2005

libartnet 0.1.2 is released

February 11, 2005

This is the first release licensed under the LGPL.

Simon buys a Netgear router and starts hacking it

January 24, 2005

The goal was to turn it into an ArtNet to DMX gateway using libartnet.

artnet-0.1.1.tar.gz released

December 12, 2004

Available from http://nomis52.net/data/artnet/libartnet/artnet-0.1.1.tar.gz This contained both the libarary and some example programs: artnet-discover.c artnet-dmxconsole.c artnet-usb.c artnet-usb.c was an ArtNet to Open USB DMX gateway.

Simon submits the proposal for his university project

August 6, 2004

http://undergraduate.csse.uwa.edu.au/year4/Current/Students/2004/SimonNewton.html This was the beginning of libartnet. The goal was to “create an open source implementation of the ArtNet protocol” and then combine the software with hardware that could transmit and receive DMX signals.

Simon emails Wayne Howell asking about ArtNet

May 26, 2004

The email that started it all: Firstly may I ask that if this is not directly applicable to you, can you please forward it to the relevant department within Artistic Licence. I decided to contact you initially as your name appears on the ArtNet specifications as I was referred to you by Ujjal Kar after posting on http://members3.boardhost.com/dmx512/index.html Let me quickly introduce myself. I am a 5th year student at the University of Western Australia in Perth studying for a Software Engineering degree ( http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au ). I have completed a Computer Science degree, as well as having studied three years of Electrical Engineering before I changed into Software. I’ve always had a keen interest in lighting and spent the majority of my high school years designing the lighting for school plays and discos. I build most of my gear myself, and my current project is programming an Atmel micro-controler to control an effects light that I have built. In July I am to begin a year-long research project as part of my Software Engineering degree and I am interested in the area of DMX over IP. I’ve looked into this area and see that there are number of protocols from different vendors. I initially thought of looking