Personal Accomplishments
Personally I was able to make significant architectural progress on the Expressive Lighting Engine, and also was able to work with the team to get the DMX protocol and hardware set up. Regarding the Expressive Lighting Engine, I decided that the system will be composed of 3 main parts.
The first is the Expressive Lighting Library. This will contain all of the functions that lights will be allowed to have. Below are the lighting functions that I have determined would be useful to have at the moment.
| Function Name | Parameters | |
| Color Hold | Light #, Color | Holds a color |
| Color Change | Light #, [Color1, color2, …], freq | Cycles between colors at a certain frequency |
| Strobe | Light #, Color | Flashes a color |
| Strobe Random | Light #, | Flashes random colors |
| Fade | Light #, Color A, Color B, Duration | Slowly changes between color A and color B |
| Blackout | Light # | Turns light off |
| *Additional Light Movement Functions will be added after MVP is met |
The Smart Lighting Logic will take in inputs from the signal processing engine and the global parameters from the user/genre detection algorithm, and use them as inputs to a dictionary which will determine which Expressive Lighting Library functions should be called.
Finally the Light Execution Queue will be responsible for executing commands generated by the Smart Lighting Logic and communicating directly with the DMX channels of the lights. It will have to be able to parse the Expressive Lighting Library function and determine which pins need to be activated.
On Track?
As a group we were able to get the DMX Protocol and the hardware set up for testing and our initial iterations. Personally, I have been able to work on the Expressive Lighting Engine. When I began to work on it I realized that there are a lot more steps to this than originally accounted for. However now that I have built out the architecture, I just need to turn it into code. I need to figure out with the group what parameters we are looking to parse out from the audio and what the global parameters will be in order to develop the logic behind the Smart Lighting Logic. That being said I feel like I am still on track to make this system work. This is because I have to just write the Library function, the Smart Lighting dictionary logic, and the execution queue. Allocating one week to each of these will allow me to get this done by around spring break time.
Goals for Next Week
The goal for next week is to write all of the Smart Lighting Library functions. I also want to work with the group to build the framework for what parameters we are going to include in the global music parameters and the signal features. Finally I will make a demo track with multiple genres of music to test our functionality on.