L.E.D. Lab
LED display client
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
L.E.D. Lab is the quickest, easiest, most powerful way to drive your LED display! Custom programming is no longer required to get up-and-running. It is ideal for artists, professional display designers, architects, VJs, lighting designers, hobbyists, and anyone wanting to add a little animated color to their sculpture, art car, home, business or wardrobe.
L.E.D. Lab allows you to create a list of Scenes, which can be played back in order or shuffled. There are currently two kinds of Scenes:
● Pictures Scene - A montage of still images, videos, and live camera feeds is designed. The position, velocity, rotation, size, and coloring of each picture can be animated. You can use your own photos and videos, and the iPad camera. Rendering to odd-shaped displays is made possible with photographically-generated map files.
● Strips Scene - Particles of color are sent down each strip. The velocity, hue, saturation, and brightness of each particle can be animated.
Other features include:
● Music - Create lists of Tracks. Each track plays a song from your music library, along with any number of Scenes. You can elaborately choreograph a song, or let the Scenes play in random order.
● Audio Reactivity - Any animatable parameter may be controlled by the amplitude of audio in a specified frequency range.
● External Control - Any animatable parameter may be controlled by MIDI, DMX, ArtNet, or OSC.
● Color Keying - An image, video file, or live video feed can be made selectively transparent, making it easy to mix in with other images.
● Tiling - Any image, video file, or live video feed can be tiled in any or all directions, with adjustable spacing and fade-out.
● Display Modes - Editing can be performed with or without the LEDs connected. The editing UI can also be hidden, allowing operation in a "kiosk" mode.
So what kind of LED display can you make with L.E.D. Lab? Some Examples:
http://ledlabs.co
Any iOS device can be used to play Scene Lists. An iPad is best for full editing.
L.E.D. Lab works with the following LED controllers:
● PixelPusher (our favorite)
● Art-Net
● sACN
● DDP/Minleon/TekLights
● RGB-123
● FadeCandy/FCServer
● OpenPixel
It can also display to an external monitor or projector, serving as a VJ app.
Extensive help information is provided for the rich user-interface:
● Help Explorer - Displays help text for any knob, slider, button, popup, list, or view inside a magnifying glass you drag around the screen. (See this in the last screen shot.)
● Help Topics - Little chapters to read about some of the more detailed functionalities.
● Help Tutorials
more I have used this app and pixel pusher hardware for years and it just keeps getting better. Every time I think to myself... “I wish I could do______ with my light installation” I find a new menu or an update that expands the already impressive capability of this app. So much thought and attention to detail keeps me inspired and pushing my creativity. Chris has also promptly responded to countless emails to help me in the darkest times to get me back on track. Steep yet intuitive learning curve but the more time you spend with the app the more you realize just how powerful it is.
I have used this app and pixel pusher hardware for years and it just keeps getting better. Every time I think to myself... “I wish I could do______ with my light installation” I find a new menu or an update that expands the already impressive capability of this app. So much thought and attention to detail keeps me inspired and pushing my creativity. Chris has also promptly responded to countless emails to help me in the darkest times to get me back on track. Steep yet intuitive learning curve but the more time you spend with the app the more you realize just how powerful it is.
I spent over ten hours trying to wrap my head around how this app works. It has a strange help system that is context specific, so you cannot read the help information outside of the context of the various modal environments. Additionally, due to a bug in the help system, it took me a while to discover that some help pages spanned beyond what was shown. The developer insisted it wasn't a bug... which contributed to me giving up and requesting a refund (which was immediately granted). I suspect the program is quite useful… if you can figure out how to use it.As he has not released a version since I reported the bug: To get around the help system bug, click on another help topic and then click back to the topic you want to view - the ability to scroll will then be available. The developer insisted that I didn’t know how iPads/Macs work instead of investigating my detailed description of the bug, which I found off putting as I worked with Apple prior to the Mac release in 1984 (including pre-release hardware) and have used Macs etc ever since then.
I spent over ten hours trying to wrap my head around how this app works. It has a strange help system that is context specific, so you cannot read the help information outside of the context of the various modal environments. Additionally, due to a bug in the help system, it took me a while to discover that some help pages spanned beyond what was shown. The developer insisted it wasn't a bug... which contributed to me giving up and requesting a refund (which was immediately granted). I suspect the program is quite useful… if you can figure out how to use it.As he has not released a version since I reported the bug: To get around the help system bug, click on another help topic and then click back to the topic you want to view - the ability to scroll will then be available. The developer insisted that I didn’t know how iPads/Macs work instead of investigating my detailed description of the bug, which I found off putting as I worked with Apple prior to the Mac release in 1984 (including pre-release hardware) and have used Macs etc ever since then.
This is NOT a simple program - it will take no small amount of trial and error to get things set up the way you want them - but once you've got it set up, it's an AMAZINGLY rich and flexible resource. I've used it with a Fadecandy-based Neopixel matrix as well as with RasPi-based HU75 matrices (both emulating PixelPushers), and it's been great with both. (And in addition to that, the author was very helpful via email in working out specific settings tweaks to get me up and running.)
This is NOT a simple program - it will take no small amount of trial and error to get things set up the way you want them - but once you've got it set up, it's an AMAZINGLY rich and flexible resource. I've used it with a Fadecandy-based Neopixel matrix as well as with RasPi-based HU75 matrices (both emulating PixelPushers), and it's been great with both. (And in addition to that, the author was very helpful via email in working out specific settings tweaks to get me up and running.)
I have been using the software with my PixelPusher since 2015. I left my unit hardware sit for a couple years and when I tried to get it working again with L.E.D. Lab I ran into problems. Christopher gave me great support in helping me get the hardware up and running. Now the software works like a charm. Love it when you deal with real pro's.
I have been using the software with my PixelPusher since 2015. I left my unit hardware sit for a couple years and when I tried to get it working again with L.E.D. Lab I ran into problems. Christopher gave me great support in helping me get the hardware up and running. Now the software works like a charm. Love it when you deal with real pro's.
• fixed some issues around the "Undiscover" feature in the LED Setup screen.
• In the "DMX" section of the LED Setup screen, you can now specify that the RGBW data be sent to multiple bytes in the DMX channel stream. This is useful for DMX floodlights and other non-LED-strip DMX devices.
2.32 12/31/2025
• Fixed to OSC control of current scene
• Fixed issue that sometimes caused a pictures scene that uses another scene as a picture to lose track of the embedded scene.
• Tweaks to the Edit Map File screen.
• DDP controllers can now have any number of outputs.
2.30 04/03/2025
• A problem that caused purchases to not be remembered sometimes has been fixed.
• The LED Setup Screen allows you to specify when PixelPusher controllers are un-discovered.
• The Virtual Strips Screen now displays correctly when the device is in Dark Mode.
• MIDI control of global brightness and speed now works properly.
• When a Scene name contained a '/' character, it couldn't be used in another scene. This has been fixed.
• Rendering large images with tiling is now faster.
• When Mapping Preview is enabled in Scene Editing View mode, touches in the preview area are now used to edit the Scene.
2.28 12/14/2024
• In the Scene Grid and Track Grid Display Modes, any scene or track set to be "skipped" in the normal play order are not displayed.
• There are several fixes and improvements to the Edit Map File screen.
• Virtual Strips text now allows there to be trailing commas
• In the LED Setup screen, the icon displayed for each PixelPusher controller now displays the "controller ordinal" number specified in the PixelPusher controller.
• Sometimes when there was an error sending data to a PixelPusher controller, and there was more than one controller, sending to the controllers and the preview would hang until the program was restarted. This has been fixed.
• When the program went to the background and then the set of connected PixelPusher controllers changed, upon returning to the foreground, the old controllers would mistakenly be assumed to still be connected. This has been fixed.
2.26 06/03/2024
• In a Pictures or Strips Scene, when Hue is modulated with the Wheel waveform, it is now possible specify Acceleration.
• In a Pictures Scene, when Rotation is modulated with the Wheel waveform, it is now possible specify Acceleration.
• A rare startup crash in the In-App Purchase code has been fixed.
• The "OSC Output..." Edit Popup item in the Scene List no longer crashes.
• XCode 15 caused a bug that would prevent the use of a Multicast IP address with an LED Controller. This has been fixed.
2.24 01/02/2024
• Full support for Dark Mode
• Better layout on iPhones X or later
• Re-vamped Edit Map File and Scan Map File screens
• There are new options for setting the start time of a Scene in Track editing
• No longer does double-tapping a Scene set its start time in a Track. There is now a button for this.
• Better handling of when images/videos move to different folders
• Tapping the current Scene re-starts it without crossfade
• Fixed bugs in Virtual Strips Screen's "sequence" UI
• One instance of LED Lab can now control the current Scene of another (on a different device)
• In Waveforms, "DMX" has been changed to "ArtNet"
• Rectangular tiles now have no gaps between them
• In the Upgrades screen, the upgrades are once again in order
• Since Xcode no longer supports iOS 9.x, the minimum supported iOS version is now 10.0
2.22 11/28/2023
• Full support for Dark Mode
• Better layout on iPhones X or later
• Re-vamped Edit Map File and Scan Map File screens
• There are new options for setting the start time of a Scene in Track editing
• No longer does double-tapping a Scene set its start time in a Track. There is now a button for this.
• Better handling of when images/videos move to different folders
• Tapping the current Scene re-starts it without crossfade
• Fixed bugs in Virtual Strips Screen's "sequence" UI
• One instance of LED Lab can now control the current Scene of another (on a different device)
• In Waveforms, "DMX" has been changed to "ArtNet"
• Rectangular tiles now have no gaps between them
• Since Xcode no longer supports iOS 9.x, the minimum supported iOS version is now 10.0
2.20 11/27/2023
• When OSC external control was turned on, Apple's Bonjour service would consume the LAN's bandwidth and cause jittery display, particularly on WiFi. This has been fixed. (Bonjour is no longer used.)
• Updated help strings for External Control Screen and Embedding Options Screen
• Improved Logic for when Scene thumbnails are created
• Removed Crashlytics framework
2.18 08/14/2022
• When new images and videos are added to LED Lab's documents folder, they now automatically appear in the UI.
• The default size of the bitmap used to render embedded Scenes is now half of what it was, leading to much faster rendering.
• The Embedding Options Screen is a lot clearer.
• The Embedding Options Screen for Strips Scenes allows the number of strips to be fixed. This is great for embedding Strips Scenes that need small numbers of strips for the desired effect.
• When a Scene has OSC Out data, tapping the "OSC" in its list cell now opens the OSC Out screen for the Scene.
• After "New Embedding Scene" and making a change, the Revert button would remove the original embedded Scene. This has been fixed.
• Revert and Redo no longer display their result with a transition. It appears immediately.
• When an image or video is missing from the documents folder, a warning message is now only displayed when the scene that refers it becomes current.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the start time of a Video Picture to be ignored when the rewind button was tapped.
• Tweaked some colors in the UI to look better in Dark Mode.
2.16 05/12/2022
• When the current track is tapped, it is no longer re-started.
• When the Track "Auto-Show Scenes" setting is turned on, the current Track's scenes are shown and all others hidden.
• When a Track's scenes are manually shown or hidden, "Auto-Show Scenes" is turned off.
• Flicking to scroll the Track Editing scene list sometimes would result in a scene being dragged. This has been fixed.
• Some audio hardware causes a large delay when starting up. This would sometimes cause the audio of a Track to lag behind its scenes. Now, the audio system is kept running so that these delays are not an issue.
• When the Track "Gap" was non-zero, the next Track's audio would be started twice. This would result in an audio glitch and cause the audio of a Track to lag behind its scenes. This has been fixed.
2.14 10/24/2021
• Fixed bug that sometimes caused crash when selecting Waveform type.
2.12 10/19/2021
• Importing videos from the Camera Roll works again
• Finding LED Lab with Touch OSC or other OSC client app works again
• Global brightness can now be controlled by MIDI, ArtNet, or OSC
• Global speed can now be controlled by MIDI, ArtNet, or OSC
2.10 09/15/2021
• Virtual Strips Specifications can now have blank lines, which are ignored.
• The XParency feature in Pictures Scenes now has sharp and soft versions
• The app now asks for permission to use the Local Network
• When a Scene is restarted by tapping it again, it no longer crossfades into itself.
• Fixed a bug that caused bad rendering when the Rendering Bitmap Size is smaller than the LED Bitmap Size
• Every part of the UI is now properly visible when the device is in Dark Mode
• Fixed bug that caused many parts of popup screens to be positioned too far to the left.
• Any time a Scene, Mapping, or other name is entered, any whitespace at the beginning and end is trimmed.
• Every Picture in a Pictures Scene now has an orientation parameter - x/y flip, 90-degree rotation
• The zoom level of the Live Camera is now remembered
• The New Map screen now has a popup to specify which camera to use, on devices that have multiple cameras.
• Pictures Scenes now have a screen that allows positioning of a Picture by entering coordinate numbers.
• Updated some code that may improve the positioning of the UI when running on an M1 Macintosh.
• When a Scene is embedded in a Scene with a default name, when the embedded Scene's name changes, the name of the embedding Scene changes as well.
• Setting the Mid injection points by dragging across a Strip Scene preview works again.
2.08 09/07/2021
Fixed some rare crash bugs.
2.06 01/04/2021
• Zooming in and out in the New File and Edit Map screens is improved
• Zooming in and out in the Compound Map screen is now possible.
• When Maps are edited, the UI on the screen is now displayed on the LEDs too.
• New command to create a Pictures Scene that uses another Scene as its first Picture.
• New ways of handling RGBW pixels/strips, in the DMX section of the LED Setup screen.
2.04 12/08/2020
• Mapping has been thoroughly re-worked - faster, higher quality, more options
• You can now make a Compound Map, a map which is made from any number of Map Files, each positioned, sized, flipped, and rotated individually. This is very useful for
A) displaying the same image on both sides of a vehicle
B) stitching together a number of optically-created maps made for different sections of an LED display that's too large to map in a single Map File
C) combining maps made from all sides of a 3D display
• The Edit Map screen now allows you to add and delete new strips and LEDs freely. You can link a sequence of LEDs so that they always stay in a straight line as you move the ends around. Basically, you can now create a Map by hand!
• Cleaned up the Strips/Picture paradigm in the Mapping Setup Screen. There is now only Virtual Strips and the Map. You can now use Virtual Strips with Rectangular Panels maps.
• There are more options when specifying simple horizontal or vertical mapping.
• You've always been able to use a Strips Scene in a Picture in a Pictures Scene. Now you can embed Pictures Scenes as well, to any level of nesting. This is dramatically powerful, particularly when used with Tiling.
• When driving ArtNet or sACN controllers, you can now use UDP broadcasting to send all data to all controllers, in the style of traditional DMX setups.
• Fixed two bugs introduced in version 2.0
2.02 03/28/2020
• Mapping has been thoroughly re-worked - faster, higher quality, more options
• You can now make a Compound Map, a map which is made from any number of Map Files, each positioned, sized, flipped, and rotated individually. This is very useful for
A) displaying the same image on both sides of a vehicle
B) stitching together a number of optically-created maps made for different sections of an LED display that's too large to map in a single Map File
C) combining maps made from all sides of a 3D display
• The Edit Map screen now allows you to add and delete new strips and LEDs freely. You can link a sequence of LEDs so that they always stay in a straight line as you move the ends around. Basically, you can now create a Map by hand!
• Cleaned up the Strips/Picture paradigm in the Mapping Setup Screen. There is now only Virtual Strips and the Map. You can now use Virtual Strips with Rectangular Panels maps.
• There are more options when specifying simple horizontal or vertical mapping.
• You've always been able to use a Strips Scene in a Picture in a Pictures Scene. Now you can embed Pictures Scenes as well, to any level of nesting. This is dramatically powerful, particularly when used with Tiling.
• When driving ArtNet or sACN controllers, you can now use UDP broadcasting to send all data to all controllers, in the style of traditional DMX setups.
2.0 03/26/2020
• Fixed bug in saving Rectangular Panels parameters
• While editing tracks, you can now display just the songs in a specified Playlist.
1.96 09/18/2019
• Custom Virtual Strips - excellent for mapping arrangements of LEDs that are in straight lines but irregular.
• Mapping Options - you can now rotate (with animation) and skew the mapping.
• Scene Options Screen - allows detailed editing of duration, speed scale, title, and other properties of a Scene
• Speed Scale - speed scale factors can be applied to each Scene, inside and outside a Track
• OSC Out - many new features and capabilities
• Map File Screen - improved UI, better editing capabilities
1.94 08/05/2019
• A bug in the scene/track Cut command has been fixed (important).
• When the app first runs, it saves the LED Setup and Mapping Setup parameters separately from any show. This allowedA the elimination of many warning messages.
• A couple of subtle bugs involving scene duplication have been fixed.
• Many subtle improvements have been made to the Tracks UI.
1.92 05/09/2019
This is a major update!
• The play, previous, and next buttons are now gathered into an orange "transport bar" along with restart and pause buttons.
• One can now select more than one Track, Scene, or Picture at a time and perform cut/copy/paste/replace/duplicate operations on them all at once.
• Revert/redo is now in its own button so you can see immediately if you've made changes.
• The Display Popup now contains a "Lock" item which hides much of the app's UI. This is great when you want the public to be able to choose Scenes but not edit your Show.
• When Autosave is off, the app still remembers the current Scene.
• In the Pictures editing UI, the Picture List now shows a thumbnail of each picture with its Coloring attributes applied.
• Tracks are now smarter how they find the Scenes they refer to. When a Scene’s name is changed, every Track that refers to it is changed as well. If a Track's Scene can't be found, the name of the un-found Scene is shown for easy repair.
• ArtNet and sACN LED controllers no longer have a limit of 682 LEDs per output.
• The Mapping Setup screen has more options for setting the "LED BItmap" size.
• A bug has been fixed that sometimes caused a crash on old (32-bit) iOS devices when the LED Setup was not yet set.
1.90 04/21/2019
• Scene invocation can now be controlled by a single DMX channel (External Control).
• A bug in controlling Scenes via OSC messages has been fixed
• PixelPusher controllers no longer have their global brightness reset when they are discovered.
1.82 12/03/2018
• You can now use LED Lab with sACN controllers
• When using ArtNet or sACN controllers, you can now configure how universe and channel numbers are generated.
• The Rectangular Panels mapping has been improved, eg: You can now use panels with vertical rows of LEDs.
• Control of the LED Bitmap SIze has been improved.
1.80 11/17/2018
• ArtNet data can now be sent starting at any universe number
• ArtNet data can now be send in a specified channel range
• LED Lab now maps “outputs” and “pixels” to ArtNet “channels” with much more flexibility. You can now drive a series of DMX devices as if they were an LED strip.
• When a PixelPusher becomes temporarily unreachable, LED Lab now waits a while before considering it "gone" and re-mapping pixels accordingly.
• A few little bug fixes.
1.78 04/19/2018
• The Display Popup has been reorganized. There is now one item for each combination of Scene/Track and List/Grid/Editing/Full-Screen. (quicker to use) There are also new "Restart" and "Freeze" items that do the same as the Freeze Animation and Restart Animations buttons in the main screen.
• The Edit Popup has a new command called "OSC Output". It invokes a screen where can specify OSC data that is sent every time a Scene becomes current.
• Better handling of permissions for microphone and camera.
• Other apps can now play music while LED Lab plays scenes without audio.
• Map Files in a Map File Set can now optionally be used in a new way: Instead of each picture choosing which map to use, the entire animated output is sent to pixels via all the maps at once, allowing the same image to be displayed on both sides of a vehicle or building.
• Scrolling the Mapping Setup and LED Setup screen is much smoother when they are lots of map files or LED controllers.
• When communication with a remote OSC or ArtNet device fails, it is now automatically re-established
1.76 12/20/2017
• fixed some issues around the "Undiscover" feature in the LED Setup screen.
• In the "DMX" section of the LED Setup screen, you can now specify that the RGBW data be sent to multiple bytes in the DMX channel stream. This is useful for DMX floodlights and other non-LED-strip DMX devices.
more Version 2.32 12/31/2025
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