Recurse Center, 2014-07-24

Glowing LEDs and me

It turned out that the SPI driver exposed a faster way to write bits, writing to all the LEDs at once, instead of one at a time, and this was sufficient to get things working!
Kyle and I started to have enough, of the glowing LEDs and decided to wrap up the project, but, Nick had different ideas for us! We had talked about having the music stream via airplay, but Nick got his DJing tools, and it would be too bad to not use it for the party, but doing that meant Airplay’s delay wouldn’t help the DJ. So, we connected a line-in, and thought we’d be done if we just read the input and used that data. But, it turns out that’s not so simple because sending data over the wire, added noise to it, and in a whole range of frequencies! I tried removing all the fourier coefficients which were lower than a threshold, but I felt like it didn’t work very well, until Nick reduced the gain of this output on the amp to the very minimum. Finally, Kyle and I decided that this was good enough for the party!
I also hacked up a quick script to read a font file, and use the grey values to get ascii characters to show up on the LED strip.

While trying to find the RPi on the network, I learnt that sudo nmap -sP 10.0.1.* gives us the hostname as well, instead of just IPs. sudo being the key, here.
Kyle and I went and grabbed dinner in a restaurant in west village. It was good to sit down and talk about various things, and eat. The glowing LEDs were totally out of my mind for that period, and the break was good!
There were a bunch of HSers doing mock-interviews and it was fun to watch, so I stayed on until quite late, when all of us headed out together.

I’m excited about trying to build a small version control system from scratch today!
Though I have had quite a bit of glowing LEDs in my face for the past week, I may suck up to it, and figure out how to do scrolling text on the display.
Also, excited to see how all the cool projects will come together in the party tonight!