[jeffschofield]

This is really cool! I built something almost exactly like this, though we used the ESP32 instead. [1]

What I find interesting is that I never had an issue with dropped columns over network using the ESP32 as an AP. Did you connect the ESP8266 up to an existing network?

I didn't see a mention of how you designed the brushes in this write up, were they all just images on an SD? I experimented with a palette app to design the brushes (solids, gradients, images, manual) and to send the frames to the brush. Curious what your solution was!

This year I am adding a gyroscope to the device to experiment with 3D space and holographic content. Also trying different LED attachments (like a circular or matrix display) for different effects. There's a lot more to explore!

I'm happy to see this today, the denser version looks very nice!

[1] https://twitter.com/JeffScript/status/1178446997507977216?s=...

[StavrosK]

Ooh, yours looks amazing as well! Yes, the ESP8266 was the AP and it was dropping (or maybe not displaying? I doubt that) packets. Maybe the ESP32 is just beefier, or maybe it's the second core (the ESP8266 probably had to put the wifi chip on hold while sending data to the LEDs).

The brushes were just images, yes. It's interesting that you'd ask that, because I didn't have a concept of a brush (it's all just images), whereas you do, since you use them :) In my case, I have a PNG with the pixels I want, and then select the minimum time step and duplicate the columns in the PNG as I want them, so I run through each PNG column to generate the "brush".

I really like how your example "fans out" by activating more LEDs in time, I should try that as well. I think you'd get much better results with some electrical tape as a diffuser (unless you like the stripes!) too.

[jeffschofield]

Haha I've been so absorbed by the brush metaphor in my take I didn't think about what other terms to use. The fanning out is from a brush size slider in the app. My goal was to make it performance friendly for artists so the app has a bunch of real-time things like that.

You're probably right about the dropped packets, though it makes me concerned I'll eventually run into the same problem and my whole workflow depends on the network not sucking lol

Do you set your time step arbitrarily? I haven't implemented a solution for stabilizing the time step (until the gyroscope is added) and found it very difficult to get non-skewed results on images. Yours look really nice though, was that just patience and a steady hand?

I really want to improve the density on mine after seeing your results. For sure I'll work on better diffusion as well, we had one that blurred the results too much so we bailed on the idea but I think a denser strip and a tighter diffusion would be awesome.

[StavrosK]

If you want to discuss further, send me a message on Keybase (or something else, whatever is convenient for you).

The ESP32 is pretty beefy, can you not do things on-device? I wouldn't rely on the network after what I've seen, but I haven't tried the ESP32.

My time step is constant, I have a parameter for it but I rarely change it. It's mostly a steady hand, yeah.

Are you talking about horizontal or vertical density? Vertically, the 60 pixel per meter strip is the best you can do (there are some denser ones but need a lot of current), but a diffuser will make it look much better. Horizontally, you can get very fine resolution, up to the refresh rate of the strip.