Weekly Status Reports

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…

Personal Accomplishments This week, the Gigbar 2 light that we ordered came, and I was able to begin properly testing my functionality. I spent the majority of this week figuring out how the lights worked, playing with the inbuilt programming of the lights, and using the DMX input to control the lights. The light set has two pars, two derbys, a laser and a strobe bar. The DMX input allows me to control each individual fixture independently. This is promising because the inbuilt programs are pretty random in their selection of what lights are on at any given moment, so with this fine degree of control we should be able to do much better than any preconfigured program. An example of this lack of inbuilt control is the fact that…

Personal Accomplishments This week, the Gigbar 2 light that we ordered came, and I was able to begin properly testing my functionality. I spent the majority of this week figuring out how the lights worked, playing with the inbuilt programming of the lights, and using the DMX input to control the lights. The light set has two pars, two derbys, a laser and a strobe bar. The DMX input allows me to control each individual fixture independently. This is promising because the inbuilt programs are pretty random in their selection of what lights are on at any given moment, so with this fine degree of control we should be able to do much better than any preconfigured program. An example of this lack of inbuilt control is the fact that…

Personal Accomplishments For this status report period, I spent the majority of the time testing and debugging the code for the lighting engine classes that I had already written. The week was also cut short by spring break, so I was not able to make that much additional progress. In terms of the testing, I was able to test the Par light functions given that the Gigbar 2 has not arrived yet. I was able to test the fade function, the strobe function, the blackout function, and the color hold function. These all had small bugs in the testing interface and software which needed to be ironed out in order to get the desired functionality. Now it should be able to mimic those changes for the other light types (derby,…

Personal Accomplishments I spent this week working on building up the LE python code. I specifically worked on two main classes. The first is the Light class. The light class contains information about the what channels are associated with a light as well as the implementation of using DMXPi to actually change pin values. There are a few different types of Lights such as Laser, Derby, Par, and Strobe. These classes all extend the Light Class and have specific implementations for controlling them individually. The second class that I worked on is the LightSet class. The LightSet class contains a group of lights of the same kind. Different functions will be called on LightSets. Examples of these functions are flash, fade, blackout and more. These classes allow the lights to…