In cube.c we have a function called cube_push(). This takes the 64 byte array and sends it down the serial line to the LED cube.

It also handles the formatting, sending every 0xff byte twice because 0xff is our escape character. 0xff and 0x00 is sent first to reset the LED cubes internal x and y counters.

In main.c we have the function cube_updater(). This function is launched as a separate thread using pthread_create(). The main thread and the cube updater thread shares the memory area rs232_cube[8][8]. The cube updater thread is just a while true loop that calls cube_push() over and over.

The first attempt at an updater thread turned out to create some flickering in the animations. After some debugging, we found out that frames were being transmitted before they were fully drawn by the effect functions. We generally do a fill(0x00), then some code to draw new pixels. If a frame is transmitted right after a fill(0x00), the cube will flash an empty frame for 1/60th ish of a second.

This wasn't a problem in the code running on the LED cube, since it has a refresh rate of over 1000 FPS, but at 60 FPS you can notice it.

To overcome this we create a double buffer and sync the two buffers at a point in time where the effect function has finished drawing the frame. Luckily all the effect functions use the delay_ms() function to pause between finished frames. We just put a memcpy() inside there to copy the cube buffer to the rs232 buffer. This works beautifully. No more flickering!

Step 66PC Software: Effect 1, ripples

This is the first effect we made for the PC software, and we think it turned out very nice.

While this may seem like a complicated effect, it's really not!

All the effect functions running on the micro controller mostly use if() statements to create effects. The effects on the PC software are built a little different. We use a lot of sin(), cos() and other math functions here. Most coordinates are calculated as floating point coordinates then typecast into integers before being drawn on the cube.

The effect you see in the video is actually just a sine wave eminating from the center of the cube, x=3.5, y=3.5.

Here is how it works:

1) Loop through the iteration counter.

2) Loop through all 64 x and y coordinates.

3) Calculate the distance between the center of the cube and the x/y coordinate.

4) The z coordinate is calculated with sin() based on the distance from the center + the iteration counter. The result is that the sine wave moves out from the center as the iteration counter increases.

Look how easy that was!