At last my time trans-location side arm was complete! I quickly moved to my bedroom and moved the giant chest of drawers and fired at the large wall it once was previously obstructing... and lept in. I ended up at the 1964 worlds fair--a curious affair filled with technology that seemed like magic to my mind. And that's when a man dressed in a slim black suit, of the finest fabric I had ever laid eyes on handed me a pair of goggles. The ominous glow was unlike anything from my time, or the present one. The man held them firmly in his grasp for a brief moment and uttered, "You must find her," and slowly faded from existence.
Oculus Aethereum
Preview them in action here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8Tyc3dmfSE
Instructions
- Get the NeoPixel library and learn more about them at http://www.adafruit.com/products/1463
- Connect two (or more) Adafruit NeoPixel Rings together
- Set the pin you connected them to in the code (Default is 4)
- Add Spots, Wobblers, Pulsars, Circlers and Growers as you see fit in the themes file!
- Adjust their speed, color, and amplitude for variation.
- Upload the code using Arduino's software.
Annotated Source
http://zeroeth.github.io/oculus_aethereum/docs/oculus_aethereum.ino.html
Nerdy Notes for the Curious
The style of this code is based on a Model/View pattern: The models (another name for classes that deal with data only) take care updating their information, in this case, the wobble or position of rotation of a light segment. The model's don't need to know about how many leds there are in a circle. The Views gather their respective Models and render them to the NeoPixel strands.
This code is object oriented uses Pointers to objects. Read more about the C++ constructors at http://www.learncpp.com/cpp-tutorial/101-constructor-initialization-lists/.
The Spot class has virtual in front of its update() method, this makes sure the proper method is called on its subclasses instead of the original method.
The #IFNDEF SOMETHING_HERE lines you see in the header files solve an annoying situation in C/C++ where including a header in multiple places gives a warning that whatever is in it has been defined twice.