Next up in terms of goals is to see how to make the sprite slow and stop naturally, and then accelerate back up to travel speed.

Witch Lights Animation Test 2: Slow, stop, go:

I've spend a few iterations tuning this. The deceleration curve is fairly decent, but it doesn't look right when it starts up from a hard stop. I think the sprite should "wind up" before going, so that means backing up a bit. I'll have to play with the timing to make it look right.

Once I have these dialed in, I can break them up into "intro" and "outro" animations, and create some loop animations to put in between.

After some trial and error, I generated an AnimationTestSprite class, and re-defined all of the char and CRGB structs to load my generated pixel art animation into memory. And told the MotionSensor object to spawn one when it detects motion. (Or when I push the test button.)

And the Arduino Due crashed so hard, I had to force erase its memory.

Welp.

I'll get into what caused it later, but I hunted down the cause and fixed it. So I just watched my first pixel art animation on the live test rig.

Witch Lights Animation Test 1: Timing Test:

The frame rate is much faster than I thought. That's good. It can also be adjusted with an UpdateInterval variable, so that's also good.

I'll go into the cause of the crash at a later date, because it's going to affect my strategy and approach to the whole thing. But for now I'm happy with this progress.

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.