Has anyone used U track 24 to trigger automated lighting?

Yes. I do! I use utrack24 to trigger song effect presets, lightning scenes, harmonizer and guitarr effect unit. i use Widelight for dmx lightning.
http://hammaroljud.se/DMX.html

I am planning to do so and already did some research on this topic. You basically have three ways of doing so:

1. using a laptop with a midi modem and a dmx modem. This will be your best choice if you don’t mind a laptop on stage. there are lots of options for the software.

Laptop-less it becomes somewhat harder

2. use a cheap dmx controller hardware for around 100 bucks with midi in. You can then trigger scenes, which is a fixed light setup like a color. Fades and Animations are possible but very limited because you have to build them youself by making a lot of scenes and switching these via midi. But these controllers can only store like 240 scenes or so, so thats the limitation.

3. use a DMX recorder hardware which can be triggered via midi. These can record a dmx stream like a video. You can then trigger the playback of these in the same way you would trigger a sample playback in an external sampler via midi. You will still need a software to produce a dmx stream to record, but this is done at home, pre-show.

You might find this thread useful, it’s in german unfortunately, but just looking up the gear JTRebel mentions might be helpful.

https://www.musiker-board.de/threads/lichtautomatisierung-per-midi-ohne-laptop.692930/

If you are making progress with this I would be glad to read about it here!

Thanks Stevic for the great tip. I looked up a live video and what you guys do with this is amazing..really inspiring and adding to the experience.