Guess! How many leds are working here?

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Guess! How many leds are working here?

I´m trying to find ways to get rid of flickering edges, artifacts and limitations caused by the 8 bit color resolution. It´s not as easy as it sounds. Okay, with fast moving animations all this doesn´t matter.
But for slow ambient light stuff the animation quality is better damn good, because otherwise it unveils the limitations of 8 bit math and leds with no mercy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-HSAOF6CWA&feature=youtu.be

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I don’t want to guess, I know I’ll be wrong, but I know that there are fewer than it appears…

I’ll try anyway, 12x12 array, 144 in total…

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I going to guess 8x8 (because it would be great if it was that few).

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I’m going to guess 16x16. Don’t keep us in suspense! :slight_smile:

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Well, @Jason_Coon guessed right. @marmil I think it would need at least a magician, to create a similar effect with an 8x8. So okay, I overestimated the impact the smoothing has. In my eyes and according to my memory it looked pretty much like a 32x32. Obviously I was too long away from the topic to judge properly.

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I was just hoping you were going to reveal some sweet new magic. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well done @Jason_Coon

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I don’t think you overstated the impact at all, @Stefan_Petrick . I’ve spent a lot of time starting at 32x32, 16x16, and 8x8 matrices. :slight_smile: I think it looks amazingly smooth!

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Here is roughly what I did so far: I used the 16 bit raw noise data - defined the interesting area (11000-51000), and scaled that down to an 8 bit value. Compared to the standard method (shift 8 bits to get the byte) so there is more usable range in the data = better color resolution. I also run a datasmoothing on the noise data so that a change happens over several frames and not at once. Then I defined a color palette, with no single RGB value <3. That helps a lot to limit the impact of the visible brightness steps at the very low end. Yes, the price is a minus of contrast, but the edges appear way more steady by this. Beside all this I aim of course for as many fps as possible (harware SPI + APAs = arround 300 fps with one noise layer) for a “temporal smoothing” and last but not least a physical diffusion in order to blur the edges between the leds a bit. Oh, and I run a basic gamma correction in order to get more visible details in the higher brightness range. But this affects not the smoothness, just the contrast and clarity of the animation.

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Thank you for the tips @Stefan_Petrick

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Glad to see you back here Stefan! You can use the GBC setting on APA 102 LEDs to get the effect of a few more bits of color depth. More details and some code in this long thread. I’m not too far away from releasing a SmartMatrix library update that will support APA 102 LEDs on the Teensy

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Hi @Louis_Beaudoin ! Nice to hear from you. Looking foreward to seeing your implementation of the GBC stuff. By the way, the last year I spend my freetime mainly with woodturning. Seriously.

missing/deleted image from Google+

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Wow, that’s some serious turning! I hope you were able to incorporate some LEDs when it was done. :wink:

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Basically it was my intention to create some nice led illumination for my art works. And now I stare on a matrix again and do audio controlled stuff… :wink: