Tower Lights Animator v2

The Tower Animator was created to produce the Tower Lights show which is displayed on the south side of the University of Idaho's Theophilus Tower. Each window is rigged with a set of LED lights which illuminate in synchronization to music. Signals are sent through the buildings wireless connection to tell lights when to light up and what color to be. The Tower Animator is the software that individuals user to make shows.

Background
In Fall of 2017, the teams from Software Engineering produced four new versions of the Tower Animator, each with their own twist and features. These four animators exhibited attractive new features such as the ability to select a color and associate it to the left or right mouse button, and the ability to copy frames so that editing in the timeline became far less time consuming. Our job is to synthesize these four new animators into one as well as add some new features of own.

Problem Statement
Our client would like to see something new that combines all of the features into one new animator, plus the ability to handle music files and use the same interface to edit the goofy glasses lights show for the marching band. This program would allow
 * The creation, editing, and management of frames
 * The addition of colors, effects, and channels
 * The use of hotkeys to map portions of the animation to transmittable sections
 * The saving of the animation in a file format

Project Goals
Our goal for this project is to make the animation processes easier for the users of the software. This will be accomplished through adding animation features such as path drawing and the ability to create groups of pixels that will be given the appearance of movement. This will allow a user to select a group of pixels and move them from point A to point B over a certain amount of time. A secondary goal for the project is to give the ability to associate an audio file with the current animation. This will allow an animation to run synchronized with an audio file.

"Marching Band Mode"

The animator will be able to enter this mode, allowing the user to develop animations for the goofy glasses marching band halftime show using the square grid interface of the tower animator. The marching band mode will be able to save animations for the goofy glasses lights show into a format usable by the marching band player.

Hotkeys

Hotkeys will enable the user to assign special effects to a frame using keyboard shortcuts. The user will be able to import these special effects from a library.

Project Problems/Solutions
Like most projects, we have run into issues with creating a new design for old software. One of the biggest issues we have had to resolve is creating an output file that is compatible with the tower animator hardware while retaining new detailed information about the animation sequences of various pixel groups. Our solution is to use a two file system: one file used to retain object information of the animations and another that is compatible with the hardware that is used for the tower show. Because of the nature of the new file system, we will need to make sure the new software is reverse compatible with the old file types. To do this there will be an import feature added to the software. This feature will allow for a user to import a file created from a previous version.

Team BZ2


Team Photo: Brandon Brewster, Zach Bjorklund, Zach Spence

Contact
Brandon Brewster (brew1642@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Zach Spence (spen3148@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Zach Bjorklund (bjor2129@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Previous Team:

Emeth Thompson (thom5468@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Ranger Adams  (adam6860@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Paul Bailey   (bail1806@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Matthew Brown (matt2714@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Cameron Simon (simo2703@vandals.uidaho.edu)