Getting a baseline reaction to the Witch Lights from cats.

This is with the acceleration and scanner animation code from last year.

So far, Samhain really LIKES seeing the lights, but doesn't really "chase" them. She just sort of... purrs while staring at the lights. And then talks to me until I make them come back for her.

Of the three cats, Elwood is the one who goes outside and hunts, and so he's the one whose "chase" instinct I'm hoping to capture.

Gilly doesn't even seem to see the LEDs as motion. She got curious where the flickering was coming from, assured herself that the LED strip was neither catnip nor food, and wandered off.

Here we are, about to upgrade the test rig on my workbench.

Old Rig

Arduino Mega & 1-meter NeoPixel strip

The current build of witchlights-fastled.ino does not run on the Arduino Mega. It gives memory errors. I don't want to get bogged down with memory optimization at this point in the game. So I'm replacing it with an Arduino Due.

The Due I'm installing is a drop-in replacement module for the control board of the Witch Lights. That way, I'm testing on the exact hardware that will be in production.

The LED strip is a five-meter WS2812B addressible LED strip, with 30 LEDs/meter. Just like the Adafruit NeoPixel strips I used in production, except without the waterproofing. Which won't matter in my home workspace, I sincerely hope.

New Rig

Arduino Due and 5-meter NeoPixel strip

And that was fast.

The test rig is in place, and the WS2812B strip works fine.

Next up is creating a new Sprite animation subclass, editing its scanner routine to map to the animation that I was working on the other day.

Speaking of which, it looks like this exported into the arduino sketch format:

//                       1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456012345678901
strcpy(afc_timing-test, "123456788                                                 ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "1234567888                                                ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "  1234567888                                              ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "     1234567888                                           ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "       123456677888                                       ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "        1223344556667788                                  ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "         111122233344556667788                            ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "              11111222233344556667788                     ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                   11111222333444555666788                ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                          1111112223344556788             ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                 11111223456788           ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                     11123456788          ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                        1123467831        ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            12468531      ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                             11386421     ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                              1287543211  ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                               18865432211");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                               886443211  ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                              88765431    ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            4887654321    ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            4886421       ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            138831        ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            138831        ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            138831        ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            138831        ");
strcat(afc_timing-test, "                                            138831        ");

So that's some progress. Taking a break now.

Things can look like they’re going to work really well, and then just don’t.

This is also tomorrow’s lesson.

Case in point:

Accelerate with scatter trail - first attempt 2018-04-26:

I tried to give each pixel of the trail a different acceleration curve, so that they trail behind and (later) fade out.

Mixed results. The different acceleration curves for the pixels mean that they change relative distances between each other, which reads as weird jitter.

More work needed.