Tuesday Update from the Quarantine – 3/24/20
Happy Filma Tuesday everyone! How goes your indefinite isolation? Hopefully you’re all doing the right thing, staying inside, away from groups of people, and noodling endlessly on something creative. If you’re not… well, there are about 1 billion artists online just dying to give you some ideas of something to do. We highly encourage you get out there on the youtubes, pinterests, and patreons and support local artists. They’re gonna need your help, they really are.
We thought we’d take this wonderful TUESDAY opportunity to give you a bit of a news update. Why Tuesday? Because it’s fuckin’ TUESDAY.
While you’re here, btw, take a minute and sign up for our newsletter will ya?
While there’s not a lot we can say about the future right now, we do hope that you’ll enjoy learning about the progress of the wormhole. Shelter in place orders tend to motivate artists to get a lot of stuff done. We’ll post more updates about our futures as well as the art as we have them.
Stay safe friends.
Wormhole 2.0 Update
As you know, we were recently awarded a grant from Unscruz to enhance the Wormhole. Shortly thereafter we were awarded another grant from the fantastic FnF folks. The two grants total in 1350 dollars which is not nothing. While we recognize and respect that all we may not show these enhancements anytime soon, we did quickly get to work on the enhancements afforded by those grants just as soon as we had gotten them. One way or another, we will come out of COVID19 both stronger… and with an improved Wormhole installation 🙂
What are the enhancements?
- 600 additional LEDs increasing overall light density by 33%
- 2 Additional transformers to power the LEDs
- A port of the controller from a tiny little computer to a microcontroller.
Wormhole Microcontroller Needs
We didn’t talk much about the microcontroller because it’s deep nerd stuff. Basically we couldn’t drive the leds quickly enough with the hardware/software setup that we had before. Given we were already unhappy with the performance and we were increasing the needs of the software by at least 33% we knew that we’d need a improvements to the Wormhole software environment.
These improvements included moving to a new hardware architecture that’s both dramatically cheaper, but also introduces less overhead (so you get faster response for free, sorta).
We’re now optimizing for this hardware and enabling the real time audio processing features.
More lights opens new possibilities…
While we’re still working on getting audio reactivity up, we have been enjoying the increased light density. Here’s a quick video of the new rainbow idle pattern.