Pixel Grid animation questions

[TomP]

Hi All,

Thanks for the earlier help with getting up and running, I am really liking the software and getting to grips quite quickly with the basics

Just for testing and messing around I have arranged a 5V 2812 strip into a 6 row * 10 column arrangement and its hooked up to an SD card controller. Please excuse the temporary Ryvita packet it is taped on to as I was doing this late evening

I'm just been playing around trying to get familiar with the software etc and ran into a few problems which I couldn't get my head around so hopefully someone will be able to point me in the right direction.

If I individually set LED's on the bottom grid or solid colours etc they work fine they also seem to work fine with other 2d animation effect such as the Meteor shower.

If I try and do frame animation i just seem to get really random results so presumably I'm doing something very wrong here as I am convinced the software and hardware are doing what they are supposed to as solid colours and individual LEDs can be controlled with no issues. I tried to do something a bit like a moving St Georges flag to test it out and here is a youtube link that hopefully gives a good idea what seems to be happening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x38wliWlmE

It seems that I can turn LEDs on (not always the right ones) and cant turn them back off, I have tried on each frame selecting black and clicking on the affected bits which didnt seem to make a difference.


Also while playing around with the pixel grid I had another question, how does the Animated Image option work? Sorry to be a pain, I was kinda hoping to get some animated images going and thought this was probably the right option to be using but I couldnt find any instructions for it like what type of images can be used/where to import from etc.

Thanks

Tom

[TomP]

OK. So I have tried fully uninstalling and reinstalling syncrolight. Everything else seems to work perfectly just not frame animation so I would assume this is something I am doing wrong when doing the frame animation. Would someone be able to please post a list of step-by-step instructions on how they would do a simple animation.

Also for a pixel tree with say 600 pixels will the SD controller work or am I going to need to get an Ethernet controller?
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In case it was something to do with desktop PC I have installed onto my laptop and am using another SD card controller but still getting the same results. Everything else works fine, can control individual pixels and all other things seem to work just not the frame animation however it works fine on visualisation just not physically.

[ForumAdmin]

Hi Tom

A lot of the Pixel Grid features in the Show Designer are really designed for the Ethernet Controller as pixels require a lot of data to be passed to the controller, especially when working with large numbers of pixels.  However it should be possible to use the SD card Controller for a small pixel grids. If you can email us a .sho file with the frame animation and confirm the Firmware version on the SD card we will take a look to see what is happening.

With regards the Animated image, this can be used where you want to use the same image (or images) repeatedly. Rather than repeatedly creating frame animations you can tie an animation to a normal channel/segment in your show.  When this segment is turned on the respective image is displayed on the Pixel Grid.

For example if you wanted to animate a chiming bell:

a) Create 2 bell images files, one of bell to left, and one with the bell to right. Use a painting package (like paint or paint.net)  to create these images of the correct size to match your grid. Be sure to have a black background. Save them as .jpg or .png

b) In the Show Designer create your Pixel Grid

c) In the Show Designer create a Display Item with 2 Segments, each with 1 channel in white. These will be used to trigger the left and right bell image. They will not be connected to any physical lights. In the attached photo the Display Item is called 'Image Trigger' the Segments are 'Bell Left Trigger' and 'Bell Right Trigger'

d) Create an Animated Image animation on the Pixel Grid item and specify the image file and the trigger channels created above.

e) Now return to the Image Trigger item and create on events for left and right triggers alternately (as shown in the photo)

f) Now Right click on the Animated Image and select "Rebuild Events". This will now generate Your Pixel Grid animation based on the triggers. If you modify the triggers be sure to rebuild the events.

   

Hope that helps

Craig.

[TomP]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the explanation of how the Animated Image works, I'm pretty sure I get it and will be making use of that.

I have emailed over the .sho file and other details, tried on SD controllers with V1.15 and V1.16 firmware with same result.

Thanks

Tom

[ForumAdmin]

Updated file for Show Designer 2.5.4 is below.
This resolves the issue identified by Tom.

Craig.


  SyncroLight.Pixel2D.zip (Size: 95.7 KB / Downloads: 5)