Cato [MOVED]Just got a spontaneous idea for a nice thing for #GPN22... let's see if this can become reality
I am committing to the idea. I ordered 50m of LED strip and a 600W power supply already. This is going to be cool :3
So far, already spent nearly 450€ on this project... this happens every time :D
But it's going to be good. Here's some of the parts involved 👀 (the train display in the back is not a part of it though)
Visited a friend yesterday to do some CNC routing on the front board :3 the result looks great, but I'm not gonna show it, I don't wanna spoil it just yet :>
Gonna laser-cut some more parts this evening, excited to see how it'll turn out. I also bought supplies yesterday for painting the thing, which I'm probably gonna start doing tomorrow.
Annoyed as fuck because I realised that the WS2811 LED strip has the possible cut points too far apart. Bought new 2812 strip now, which means I also need to use 5V instead of 12V so the entire 160€ worth of power supply and LED strip is now useless and I spent another 200€ on the new LED strips. Also fucking annoying that now I only have about two weeks from when the LED strip arrives to when I need to have it done
Gonna have a lot of software work to do until GPN. The delay caused by the unfitting LED strip (really this is my own damn fault) doesn't make it easier. But I can already try to do some of that work at #FSCK24 this weekend, since what I'm building for GPN is similar to another project of mine :3
Doing some more assembly and boy does it look good. This might be my best-looking project yet. Still not gonna spoil the surprise tho :3
Painted the back white and added hinges, the power input, and locks. Still missing all the internals tho :P
Cato, registered LynxⓁAlright, 50 meters of WS2812 LED strip have been acquired. Expect some progress soon :3
Temporary wiring, will be cleaned up tomorrow when I get the proper DIN rail terminal blocks~
I tested it at full brightness and yeah, 2062 WS2812B LEDs are... pretty bright :D
They also draw 1.87A of quiescent current, but that's okay, I knew it wouldn't exactly be energy efficient 
Over the last few days, I rewrote some base building blocks of my software framework to enable this project. I wrote auxiliary tools to help me, I implemented new features, wrote a new driver component wherein I did things quite differently than before and all that. Yet, I plugged it in, and it basically just worked. Incredible
I did find some bugs now though - if not it would have been really weird :D
Running on a whopping 100 minutes of sleep today! As expected, I spent the night desperately getting my #GPN22 project ready. This included fun sidequests like "find all malloc-related menuconfig entries that need to be changed after enabling PSRAM on the ESP32" and "learn that the LEDs will not light up when the controller is physically unplugged from the socket" or even "stare at the screen with half the brain capacity of an orange cat until the funny words make sense". 3/10 wouldn't recommend
how funny would it be if I posted all these updates, showed these large parts, all for it to be just a colour-changing LED wired up to a coin cell battery in a large wooden box
Alright so here it is! If you haven't pieced it together yet, I built a huge 16-segment display with RGB LEDs. It can not only display characters, but the LEDs are mapped internally to allow displaying pixel graphics as well (with pretty low resolution of course)!
Find it at #GPN22 :3
I managed to get those janky shaders smooth! One improvement was using fixed point arithmetic instead of floating point, but the biggest improvement, nearly doubling the framerate, was...
...fixing the stupid oversight that caused the two halves of the LED strip to be updated sequentially instead of in parallel. 
Drew McGowen@cato someone's gotta ask it, so I will...
Can it run doom?
@quantumdude836 not yet :P I'm sure it could be done somehow
Well that wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Made a "Matrix" / "Code rain" effect for the display :D