Suffice it to say, I won't make this one very long. Not everyone can read about coding approaches and enjoy it. I guess I can liven things up a bit with some of my youtube work.
With rainbowduinos in hand, I began to code. I had to open up the capabilities of the rainbow to allow for more direct control from a master arduino. Specifically, the rainbows came with no way to send 'pixel by pixel' information, only text characters and a few other simplistic functions. I changed that pretty quickly. Well, quickly in relative terms to the total ungodly amount of time I've spent on this.
From there I included what I like to call chromatics. These were abbreviated data structures that would use a simple on/off state for each pixel, and then apply a color to all of the pixels. With that I made monochromatic, dichromatic, and trichromatic data types for one, two, and three colors respectively. This reduced the bottle necking of my kludged together rainbowduino code. I've since abandoned that code set, but I keep the data types living on in a fair number of my animations.
From there I made my first animations. Not rocket science all of them, I admit, but it warmed me of to the methods and concepts of matrix and display manipulation that would become the bread and butter of most of my code.
And finally, I made my one of my first masterpieces. One of the original 'when pigs fly' ideas I had at the very beginning of the project in 2006. Ideas I had had but over the following years had taken on a sort of mythical status, something that would disappear into the pages of history unrecorded. But, after days of trial and error, reteaching myself the fundamentals of programming, and one of the most convoluted and painful debugging sessions in my life, I had accomplished the impossible. I had made a spectrum analyzer, one that responded to sound. I had fulfilled one of my original requirements for the project.
Enjoy.
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