DPHP 8 - The Most Signiture 5 Notes Ever

And no, it's not Jaws, that's only 2 notes. We can't all be John Williams.

But first, a house keeping video.



Right, so, that's out of the way.  This is a lot of 'house keeping' animations, ones that I had sitting in notebooks and as little notes on my design docs.  I had a 'lull' in code work so they came to life.  If you're so inclined, have a read of the description.

Now, onto the good stuff.  I have a few static images in there (if you look carefully you'll see my Alma mater).  Around 0.38 it gets interesting.



This was a continuation of my 'must include sound' goal, as well as being one of the earliest ideas I came up with for animations, behind the pinwheel, rain, and the spectrum analyzer.  Who doesn't know the 5 note progression from Close Encounters of the Third Kind?  I remember knowing that note progression even before I had seen the film.  In this video it's accomplished with a rather meek buzzer, so it sounds rather grungy.

The animation came about as a sort of 'happenstance.'  I updated the arduino IDE and noticed that a new function had been added to the base library: tone().  Turns out you could tone generate on any of the pins.  Spiffy.  A bit of research into note frequencies and several hours of staring at the film footage and I had a timing and color correct reproduction of the movie scene.  Well, as best I could generate that is.  It's hard to tell in the video, but yes, the colors are the same as the ones used on the big 'light board' in the background of the film.  The placement is different, but that was a style decision on my part.

the fireworks you've seen before, but this is a 'fixed' version.  Brownie points to the person who figures out what was wrong in the original and was fixed in this version.

Finally in the video, another one of my infinitely useful tool functions.  Text.  It took a painfully long time and painfully levels of creative energy to make ASCII characters that are only 4 pixels wide by 6 pixels tall.  You have no idea how hard it is to replicate the alphabet with only 24 dots.  But that pain was singular and it made if much easier to have text marques.  And with text marquees is much easier to present technical information to a viewer.  While all the other static images, emotions, etc, it should be easy to carry on a coversation (at least a basic one).  But when asked specific, direct questions, it's best to rely on ordinary text.  Imagine giving signals of some sort to indicated any of the stuff presented in the text.  Yikes.