Hodi’s – Energy and Time

Bringing the HForce LED light bar I designed to Turn-Table Tuesday at Hodi’s 1/17. This will be it’s first official appearance as part of a show; guess it’s finally out of beta. The show is FREE, come on down!

UPDATE January 18 2017: The HForce LED bar behaved well, except that yesterday’s code changes had the rather odd side-effect of making it prefer dim pastel backgrounds. Lots of washed-out teal and pink. Today I will try to figure out why that happened. Not unpleasant, just unexpected. It was supposed to fade to black more often. Where art and software meet, strange things happen. Thanks to Bri for inviting me, Brandon for being the main VJ, and the guy who said “You’re my hero, man! I hope I’m still dancing when I’m your age.”

I finally *did* get to field-test the LED system at Hodi’s this week. Mostly, it went very well. Sound response was good and the auto-level-setting code handled the extremely loud bass just fine. The battery pack was still above 75% after 2 hours of continuous use. Neither Raspbian nor the program ever crashed.

The LEDs were way too bright even at 1/4 max brightness; I recoded that down to 1/8, which was only a *little* too bright, but I’m not happy that that effectively restricts me to 5 bits of brightness resolution. It might be better to put the system behind tinted glass or plastic and crank it up, although low brightness levels are very nice for battery life and system voltage margins.

The code that fades the display to black when there’s “silence” turned out to misbehave slightly when I lowered the brightness to 1/8, so I had to add a couple of lines to be sensitive to that and “do the right thing” for different brightness levels.

I also got to unplug the system from monitor/keyboard/mouse and wear it as a belt while dancing, which was nice. I took video on my iPhone 4, but its camera was not designed for such extreme contrast, and so didn’t show the colors very well.

Zac Rachid was in the audience and we discussed using the system or something like it at his October show. It’s too early to tell what form that might take.