Tower Lights Animator

Welcome to the project Wiki for UIdaho's Tower iLLuminati senior design team. Here you can find out all there is to know about the Tower Animator project. Project background, why we are working on the project, our design choices and more will be detailed here. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the contents of this Wiki then please email the project representative; their contact information is listed at the bottom of the page.

Background
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.

Problem Statement
The current Tower Animator software functions properly, but it is not very easy to animate a new show. Each frame of a light show is a 4 x 10 grid of individual lights and a show typically has from 500 to 1000 frames. The current animator requires each light to be assigned value one at a time. For example, a light show that is 750 frames and has on average 40% of the frame lit up during the show would require the user to click 12,000 on individual squares in the current animator. In short, its a very tedious and time consuming process.

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.

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 Tower iLLuminati


Current: Paul Bailey, Matthew Brown, Ranger Adams, Emeth Thompson

Previous: Heyan Huang

Contact
Emeth Thompson (thom5468@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Ranger Adams  (adam6860@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Paul Bailey   (bail1806@vandals.uidaho.edu)

Matthew Brown (matt2714@vandals.uidaho.edu)