A fortnight of weeknotes from Chris, and so naturally a pun shoehorned into the title.

There has been some interest of late at DoES Liverpool for scrolling text on addressable led matrix displays. The nights are gradually begining to get longer, I know we’re not ready to hear that yet but it’s happening. So I decided to have a look at how we could use these displays with the portable My Bike’s got LED boards. The timeline was pushed forward slightly because some of the Folk riding Bike’s group are planning a trip to Blackpool to Ride the lights next week. Flexible panels of addressable leds can be picked up for under £10 and an 8 x 32 display is comfortably within the capabilities of the 2.5 amp output of My Bike’s got LED.

My Bike’s got LED runs WLED which has inbuilt support for 2d matrix lights. Setting up the matrix is straightforward in the GUI under the ‘2d setup’ menu in settings. This allows you to describe the size, orientation and wiring order of the panel. Once that is set up it’s as easy as picking the correct effect, in this case ‘Scrolling Text’. Well, almost. The text displayed on the matrix is the name of the segment so a little bit more setup is needed. But once set it can be saved as a preset. There are plenty of other built in 2d effects in WLED so if you’d prefer a pyschedelic light show that’s also an option, and some offer sound reactive elements if you have an audio input set up.

The quirk of describing text as a segment name makes it a little cumbersome to change the text live. But with a bit of forward planning a set of phrases can be created as presets and chosen through the WLED provided interface. Another option is to make a handlebar button to toggle through presets. I also tried adding an additional panel giving 8 x 64 pixels, which was still within the limits of the battery powered board.

All of this was achieved with the main WLED distribution (v0.15.1). An alternative distribution, Moon Module has some additional experimental features that might be worth a look for future experiments.

Aside from that, and Museum in a Box work, I spent a week away from the office camping in Ceredigion and learning the many and varied ways it’s possible to fall off a stand up paddleboard.

Adrian has been editing video. He’s done the first pass of processing the thirty-odd gigabytes that he and Neil recorded the other week—working through the 360 footage to choose camera angles and shots, then exporting that out to “2D” video files. That’s boiled it down to around fourteen gig now. Next step is to work out which sections of the 2D video to keep, and how to slot things together into a cohesive whole.

That will probably show up a few more shots we’ll need to film.

He also did a little bit of video processing from the talk he gave on Wednesday, to tidy up the livestream footage and republish it with better (well, mostly just louder) sound.

That talk is the other notable thing he’s done this fortnight. It was the first event of the new DoES Salon series that we’re sponsoring; he gave a talk to run through the wealth of things you can do with OpenStreetMap

Neil has been writing blog posts, general stuff and analysis.