Recurse Center, 2014-07-17
- Kyle and I did a demo of our spectrum analyzer/visualizer during the presenations. It was fun to work on, though we mostly just followed a tutorial on the web, and made use of a bunch of libraries.
- I spent the night in HackerSchool.
- I was cleaning up the code in the tutorial we were trying to follow.
- Also, cleaned up the install.sh used by lightshowpi project to not do all the ugly sudo setups, and use a Python virtualenv and install into that.
- Refactored the ugly looking music part of the tutorial into a smaller script with only the functionality that we were going to use.
- We hit an interesting bug that would light up all the LEDs on the strip, once in a while. I didn’t notice it during the night, because I had a “decay” factor (the max factor by which the height of the columns should get reduced between successive updates) was 0.9, but when the decay factor was reduced to a lower value, it would happen quite often. Also, we didn’t see this happening before. So, we thought the bug was in the code I had written, when I should have been sleeping. After reading and debugging my code for a bit, with Kyle and Sean, I thought it was something hardware related that we were doing wrong. But, it turns out that a library we were using lit-up the whole strip, when start and end values were both zero, instead of not lighting up anything!
- Also, we hit another off-by one error, just before the demo. I didn’t do the math for splitting the strip into columns too carefully, and we hadn’t noticed the off-by one error until we taped up the strip into different columns on a pillar for demo.
- There were some cool presentations by others. I’ll update the list on Monday, since I currently don’t remember them all! Looking at the list of names on the registration sheet would help!
- The cleaned up code is here