Gregory's ServerI've implemented parts of a content pipeline for rendering a scene on the PC and streaming it to this display, but writing video streaming code is so much less fun than playing with voxels that it may take a while to finish.
Here, I've stored the animation uncompressed on the display itself, and am updating it as fast as the Pi's SD card can handle. (Not very fast.)
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The other problem I have is that to sell the 3D effect I need to move the camera around a lot, so I'm going to have to put some effort into building a studio backdrop. Incidentally, those models are from Cheello's voxel Doom: https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project/addons/voxel-doom - It's a lovely mod, and makes Doom feel more like my memories of playing it than the real thing does. I had a panel left over, and I thought I should have another stab at an oscillating display. I wanted to give it an undulating motion and came up with what seemed like a nice linkage, but the end result looks like it was designed by Trevithick. It's a nice fluid motion on the panel, but overall it doesn't bring me joy. I rewired the back of the panel to tidy up all the loose flappy cables. It now manages 600 rpm, which is not too flickery. In the continuing quest for higher rpm, I've moved the controller down below the screen and across the axis of rotation. It's a lot harder to get at if I need to rewire anything, but it does improve the balance. It feels as though I'm endlessly rebuilding it, for diminishing improvements. But in the most recent rebuild I finally solved a mystery that has been bugging me. When the display had been running for a while, it would quite abruptly lose balance and start vibrating. After the last occurrence, it was never quite the same. On stripping it down I found this. That's the mount for the slip ring. A cylinder carrying a couple of copper bands fits over the pillar, and an M4 bolt goes own the middle to hold it all together. It has very clearly become bent, and without any signs of cracking. Presumably, as it spins, it heats up enough to soften the PLA, and the spring loaded brushes push it out of alignment. I've reprinted it in ABS; going to see how well that lasts. I’m now suspicious of all the PLA parts. The little pit with the Pi in it is getting very warm. I do like an ample window and natural light, but it makes it hard to see the leds. Hence this pirate astronaut. Doom running at a larger scale. Easier to make out what's going on, harder to see what's shooting at you. This display works by spinning a matrix display rapidly about a vertical axis, lighting up each LED as it passes through part of a 3D image. The way you update the displays has a big impact on the quality of the image. If you turn the panels 90 degrees so their scan lines are now columns, you can do a bit better. The update doesn't have to be sequential - instead of stepping one column at a time, you can skip a few each time. As long as you pick a number which is coprime with the number of columns, and you wrap around once you go past the last one, you'll still visit each of them but spread out more evenly throughout the volume. The real improvement comes when you adjust the update rate for each column to match the length of the track they have to sweep out. Instead of wrapping around when you reach the last column, you wrap around when your counter reaches the square of the number of columns, and you update the column corresponding to the integer square root of the counter. This gets rid of the bright dense region in the middle, and adds more updates out at the edges making them less sparse. In practice it's complicated by the fact that these panels update two lines at once. Every time you update a column in the outer half, you're also updating one in the inner half. I couldn't find a simple procedural update strategy to spread these evenly, so I ended up generating a lookup table for it using simulated annealing. First test of the new design, and already I’m happy. Quiet, high refresh rate, and doesn’t feel like it’s seconds away from embedding itself in my face. So many complaints about the framerate on that last video, so I decided to upload one with a shorter exposure and more flicker. But I still ended up keeping it below 30 fps, so I suspect the complaints will be about both framerate and flicker. Just have to hope the algorithm doesn’t go so large on this one. https://youtu.be/gBfclb9hXCI New dome! There’s now an accelerometer in the base, synced to the rotation of the screen. I’m hoping this will help me get it balanced better. I don’t entirely understand the shape it’s producing, but the line is pointing in roughly the direction I think it should be pointing. There’s a fair bit of planning involved in finding the true centre and height of these domes. When I come to make the cut it feels like cleaving the Cullinan diamond. With the previous dome the cut had a somewhat hand made look to it, so I printed a thin piece of trim to slip over the edge and keep it neat. It was too big for the printer so I used TPU, printing it in a spiral and flexing it back in to the right diameter. An unexpected benefit was that it was way quieter with that isolating the dome from the base. Now thinking I should have filmed the tool I made to press all the clips on this IEC socket so I could get it out of the housing in order to film the satisfying click it makes when it goes in. Yet another round of finding new places to hang counterweights, and I’ve hit 900rpm - 30fps. Amazing to scroll back to the start of this thread and see me wonder if I could get some sort of rudimentary depth effect going. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydk3BhlUWYE I've been working more on capturing footage. Hand held camera movement is still a mess, but putting the content into rotisserie mode helps sell the 3D with a static camera. What this thing needed was another source of barely recognisable low res flickery points of light. I tried the thumbnail testing feature on Youtube for the first time, which was fun. Upload 3 different images, and it randomly applies them and shows you which one was the most engaging. This was the winner. (I didn't include one with my surprised face and an overlaid arrow pointing at something) |
My target for this display is 600 rpm - lower than that and it's too flickery; higher than that and I can't refresh fast enough to get 400 voxels around the circumference without dropping to 1 bpc. I'm nudging 400 rpm here, and it's still pretty unfilmable and absolutely terrifying to be close to. I have to decide whether the overall approach is worthwhile enough to start spending money on aluminium and polycarbonate.