The attention to detail, I find the details fascinating. He's a really bright guy but designing the protocol, making software so that the creative agency can program the lighting without him in the loop, writing firmware that protects the installation from damage even if they're ham fisted with the lighting sequence they design etc etc
This is rad! I have a bunch of LED matrices I currently use https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix for, I need to spend some quality time with Anypixel to see how it compares / if I can combine the two.
I wish that "in browser previewer" link actually led to a usable in browser thing rather than just a folder on GitHub.
The descriptions on that page are really weird. They're just descriptions looked up by category, but they try very hard to obfuscate it by being uh, personable and witty.
On it's own, that wouldn't be so bad (just quirky) but the style doesn't lend itself to accuracy or brevity and it's hard to tell which, if any, of the text was written by a person maintaining the project's page on the site.
E.g. in answering the question: "Can I make it?" with an overall score of "98%"
Yeah, you will probably be able to make this. Feels like this is almost complete, only thing missing is your spirit and some minor stuff.
Below that is the actual list of things that are missing, which contains one item (apparently worth "+2"): Difficulty is relative, especially with footprints I have never seen before.
I have no idea what this means (I suppose it's about PCB footprint? I think the first part of the sentence is just banter?), but anyway, the top text is just a representation of the 98% "Can I make it?" category, which a less witty website would describe as "Project progress" or something. The representation of 73% is Yeah, you might be able to make this. There's still quite some homework left, but it's doable for you, isn't it? And I didn't even quote the parts where they anthropomorphise the website...
To end on a less curmudgeonly note, apart from the copy-editing, the overall execution seems good; I like how they break down the total cost of the project.
thanks for taking the time to comment on the presentation of the projects. We try to index and rate all open source hardware projects by their development stage. Our goal is to provide an insight for users like you whether the project can be built. For that we evaluate the difficulty and the project's dependencies (like parts).
You are right that some of our copies are a bit quirky and maybe need better explanation/call-to-actions. We already work on that and will soon release a revised version. Our designer has tried to "humanize" our analysis to make it a bit more approachable, maybe we need to put some additional effort into that ;-)
I work in the NYC office where this is. The button wall is interactive and cycles through various modes that are mostly pretty abstract and colorful, but clicking the button will make a propagating disturbance depending on the mode. One of them was Conway's Game of Life, which I thought was really clever.
Very cool. Perhaps Adafruit, Sparkfun or the like will whip up with a kit that utilizes these types of led arcade buttons, but on a much smaller scale. Also, I wonder if they make "mini" led arcade buttons so you could tighten up the array a bit. It seems that smaller buttons would create better visualizations if space was limited.
Lol... I had that page open in a tab since last night. Just came into my office to hear my computer fan running hard. Seems Chrome was pegging my CPU at like 200% for like a day.
They build cool stuff on top of Google tech, basically. They're in a few different locations, so there's more than one team. I've only worked with them as an external contractor, so I'm not sure what the official elevator pitch is though. But here's a few of the projects they've done: http://www.thefwa.com/profile/google-creative-lab
According to the source code, this works using a few things. The main thing powering this is Pixi.js, a 2D HTML 5 Canvas/WebGL renderer: https://github.com/pixijs/pixi.js/
It tracks your mouse, or touch event. Whenever you move, it accumulates a number (search "mouseForce") to the nearby pixels. This number is then used as an index into a sprite sheet[1][2]. It uses Pixi's MovieClip object for the heavy lifting, but they create their own Tile object to hook the mouse force to the sprite sheet.
So to sum up, they create a grid of Tile objects, each of which accumulates a number based on nearby mouse/touch movement, then uses that number to index into a sprite sheet rendered by Pixi.js.
https://youtu.be/9Qlmywxjau0
The attention to detail, I find the details fascinating. He's a really bright guy but designing the protocol, making software so that the creative agency can program the lighting without him in the loop, writing firmware that protects the installation from damage even if they're ham fisted with the lighting sequence they design etc etc