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Interesting question. While Airfield would be great for lighting the backglass itself, and producing chase patterns behind the image, it would be a bit of a hack to wire it up to seven segment displays in its current form. That said, the matrix chip we employ (max7219) was designed to drive 7-segment displays, so I suppose it could be done. You’re probably better off sourcing/designing your own controller board for this though, and using Airfield to control the patterns behind the image.
Great work! There are plenty of tools for making animated GIFs. Doing it right from Photoshop is probably the best, if you’re already using that tool. Otherwise, you can use something like this online tool:
https://imgflip.com/images-to-gif
You just need to resize your images before uploading, because it doesn’t support a nearest neighbor resize method (criminal!).
I’m a little confused. In the first column of your image (hour), is that the minute hand pointing straight up to 12:00? If so, it looks different than in the MINS column (two pixels wide instead of 1). I’m also not sure how you differentiate between the hour and minute hands, since they’re both single pixels and look to be the same length.
I think a better approach would be to write code to draw the clock in layers; first background, then hour hand, then minute, then second. You could do what transparent GIFs do, and assign a single color as “transparent” that just doesn’t get drawn. Then just redraw the whole scene every second. That’s basically what the digital clock is doing, but it draws digits from left to right and doesn’t require transparency.
In your example, I think the clock looks great though. Way better than any analog experiments I came up with.
Sadly I’m really late for bed and don’t have time to test this on the Game Frame, but it should work. REALLY nice work, DM. Very clever.
In Photoshop I just went FILE -> SCRIPTS -> EXPORT LAYERS AS FILES.
In IRFANVIEW (a free PC app) I went FILE -> BATCH CONVERSION, added all of the files output from Photoshop, sorted them by name (descending), and output as 24-bit BMP using the Name pattern “#”. No quotes, obviously.
I agree there needs to be a smoother process — ideally some kind of cross platform front end to imagemagick — but this process has worked well for me so far.
Oh, man. These are great! Very smooth, Lemmings-like animations. I didn’t even know Goombas blinked.
That is excellent! On Game Frame, you’ll just have to duplicate frames to make them stay on screen longer than others (though you can control the general frame rate). With animated GIFs, you can set per-frame duration.
Hi John,
I’m not planning to offer the frame parts for sale on the store anytime soon. Perhaps after I catch up with orders. There’s just a lot of fragile parts, and I worry about transit damage and support, so I’d rather just put the things together for you for my own peace of mind. I know people enjoy that aspect though, so I’ll probably work something out later.
Ping me through Kickstarter, if you haven’t already, and I’ll see about being in touch with you closer to ship about local pick-up. I’m afraid the “build party” is going to last a couple months. 🙂
Oh wow, very cool! I love your frame. Very 2001/THX 1138. 🙂 Great idea too, but it will have to go on the list of possible user mods and you guys can decided what to take out in order to put more in. Or, more than likely, someone who can actually code will make mine more efficient and squeeze more stuff in there.
Looks great, man. Careful though, your files 6.bmp and 7.bmp are both 32-bit. All files must be 24-bit, as you probably know.
INI files are optional if you want to use their features. You can edit them with any text editor. I recommend Sublime Text on Mac and PC:
Yep, horizontal filmstrips work fine. You could even do a diagonal one if you were crazy, but you’d be crazy.
Really cool, Damage. I’ll really enjoy watching your project evolve. Why not use strips instead of soldering your own boards?
Micro’s right, those are the panels I’m using (with a custom connector). While you can connect multiples, the bezels need to overlap and I’m not sure you can get the adjacent panel LEDs 1cm away as they need to be. Plus, doing a larger grid with them means calculating for the various zig zags, which sounds like a real headache to me.
Bingo. Plays all the way through to the end and loops fine. (Looks really cool, too.) Thanks for helping me discover and diagnose this!
Well, I think you basically found the maximum resolution. The use of signed 16 bit integers just cascades throughout the code, and the amount of Flash and RAM left is just humorous. Just to test adding a single 32-bit integer resulted in this cute bit of debug text:
Binary sketch size: 32,250 bytes (of a 32,256 byte maximum)
So the maximum resolution is theoretically 32,767 X/Y, but I’m sure we should reduce that in case there is code that relies on larger values (off screen stuff). So let’s say 32,000. Photoshop won’t even allow me to save a BMP that big (16×32000). If you can make one, I’ll test it out. It would be an even 2000 frame filmstrip.
