ffmpeg animated gif custom palettes

I used ffmpeg to make the animated gifs for my gallery of NeoPixel goggles patterns.

In the process I discovered that as well as the expected fairly straightforward conversion mode, ffmpeg -i mymovie.mov mymovie.gif, there is another mode which can generate a custom palette. Because apparently by default, a default palette is used.

That is a slightly more awkward two step process, described for example here, but at least for my goggles GIFs looks way better (to me) although turning out to be four times the size:

Galois LFSR PRNG in NeoPixel goggles

I've been playing with software to run on my Adafruit Neopixel Goggles. The software gets to make pretty patterns on 32 x 24-bit RGB LEDs arranged in two rings.

One of the modes picks random colours to change each ring to. The Arduino stack supplies a random() function to do this, but it seemed to take up about 600 bytes of the limited 5kb flash program memory on the in-goggles microcontroller.

I wondered if I could make a smaller-but-less-random generator. After all, the colour pattern does not need to be cryptographically secure. I'm just trying to avoid getting the same sequence of colours every time.

Someone pointed me at Linear Feedback Shift Register PRNGs and I implemented one based around a description in Wikipedia. I chose the Galois one because pistols at dawn.

That seemed to work well for the basic generation of random numbers, but the Arduino always started up with the same seed, and so gave the same sequence of colours each time. Luckily, there are 512 bytes of EEPROM on this microcontroller and so I used two other those to generate and store a seed to be used next time.

Initially, I generated two random bytes at power-on, and stored those into the EEPROM. However, this rapidly proved to have a really short period: there were only two different patterns being displayed by the goggles in this mode!

So, next, which seems to work better, the code now initialises the PRNG from EEPROM, takes a single bit from it (and discards it) and then writes out the PRNG state into the EEPROM. That means that the start state advances by one bit every boot.

Code for the goggles is here on github: https://github.com/benclifford/goggles.

Lua Fibre-optic Christmas Tree

In 1998, I was given a fibre optic christmas tree, lit by two coloured light bulbs powered by 2 x AA batteries. In the intervening years, the electrics broke. Finally today I got round to doing something about it.

The tree now has a bunch of neopixels where the bulbs used to be, and an ESP8266 microcontroller providing the flashing (as well as a Wifi/telnet accessible Lua command prompt).

Unfortunately, I can't see much of a different between the illumination provided by the seven pixels - I was hoping that each one would light the fibres up very differently, but that hasn't turned out to be the case. No big deal though, and maybe more optical isolation between the different LEDs and the base of the fibre bundle would help.

Interestingly, the fibres manage to project an image of the layout of the LEDs on the board (see link above) onto the wall behind the tree! and all the fibres emit a very slight blue light because there's a blue LED on the controller board.