I have had long thought sessions about how to make my LED creations interactive. Toying with sensors, buttons, sliders etc… has often wielded “meh” results. In the end, a web/app based approach will probably be best. But how do i make it un-boring? The idea of the Idle render, what is rendered when no interactivity is around, is very important. I had an idea last night about a structured render algorithm that could be made to create really interesting patterns and be structurally interactive.

Most of my render algorithms are very similar, varying slightly in certain ways:

• Create a color object using an index value starting at 0 ending at “6 x Maximum value of Each LED”
• Create an X and Y coordinate using either a random number bound to the LED map, or a certain pattern
• Apply color to a pixel, line, box or circle at X Y co-ordinates
• render
• add a delay of d milliseconds
• apply a canvas shift function of some sort
• apply a canvas fade function with a fade value f
• repeat

The above creates some amazingly diverse animations. I plan to write up a simple web interface that allows you to control each step and then send the updates to the MU via wifi.

Here is a rough draft of a web app:

This sends a POST data packet at each change in the interface that looks like this:

colourStyle=2&colourStyleControl=1&red=64&green=0&blue=0&coOrdinateStyle=1&coordinateControll1=0&coordinateControll2=0&coordinateControll3=0&coordinateControll4=0&renderObject=1&delay=10&shiftMethod=0&fadeLevel=42