Personal Accomplishments
This week we spent working on integration and advancing my individual part in the Expressive Lighting Engine. The work on the lighting engine involved taking care of bugs and building out certain functionality. The implemented strobe, fade, blackout, and color cycle and color hold ended up working after some significant bug fixes. The fade is especially hard because an input to the fade function was how long the fade should take to reach from one color to the next. The way that I have been writing these fades is to increment and decrement the light color intensities until the desired color is reached. This is tough if the fade is over a long period of time because then the change in color will be very granular and less smooth. It is also tough to account for the amount of time it takes for the instructions to get processed, but for now I have just discounted that time and only include the wait commands as part of the total time.
On Track?
We are working on integration this week so this should allow me to start working on the function mapping of sound inputs to lights. However I think it is pretty tough to say how long all the integration will take. That being said I think we should be on track given that we have a couple weeks until the demo.
Goals for Next Week
Once all the integration is complete, I think we could make a system that mimics, if not outperforms the standard sound active mode on the Gigbar2. I think that with basic integration we can do simple beat detection and then randomly choose light effects to see the lights flash in time. This will then allow us to place the lighting logic into the system seamlessly.