Someone asked me recently how I know what any particular image on my POVpoi would draw in amps (as in, how do I know the battery can pump out enough juice for the image.) Since I had already written a program that converts an image to the LED data I need, it was a matter of multiplying the values with 20mA and by the amount of pixels on a strip. Kinda fun to see this:
This is a great idea. What is the -MTLW+ or +MTLW+ ?
-/+M -> tells me if the image has transparency (matte)
T -> tells me the thumbnail was written
L -> tells me LED data was written
W+# -> tells me how many times the image is repeated when arc-ed.
It helps in debugging, like when I started running into memory allocation problems and discovered it was reading all images as +M when ran as a wildcard (individual runs were fine.) Turned out I forgot to re-initialize a variable.
The new dynamic power management code @Mark_Kriegsman added a couple of weeks ago can show you this live too :-).
This step is well before anything gets on any hardware.