■ FIGURE 2.
■ FIGURE 3.
18
November 2011
that each have three windows. Each window is on its own
circuit — again from their own Spin cog — to create a
spinning effect in the windows. I did this by dimming one
window (on each side) down to about 10%. By running
this in a loop, it creates the illusion of motion inside the
machine — similar to what we did with the Larson
Scanner.
As a final bit of fun, I added another cog to each
character which uses Morse code and a rear-facing LED
module to emit, "Red 5 Studios Firefall" which is followed
by the name of the character (the female is called
Morningstar). Thankfully, everyone loved the effect and as
these are military characters, we explained it as their IFF
(Identification, Friend or Foe).
The Firefall display was a tremendous hit with the
employees of Red 5 Studios and the thousands of
participants at PAX. I really enjoyed sharing how we
built the display. With sound (using the Propeller-powered
AP- 16+), pneumatic motion in the "thumper" machine,
smoke effects, and fully lit characters, it was quite a
spectacle.
See? LEDs are totally cool! Unfortunately, I cannot
give you the character control code (it's owned by the
client), but I have added a demo (jm_led_show.spin) to
the downloads file that will illustrate the technique I used
in the character lighting controllers. The demo has the
same circuitry as the Cylon program and two lighting
■ FIGURE 4.
