Arrrrgh!!!

[MazdaFan]

Has anyone figured out the S3 .las or .lms files?  I've been working on a piece of software that, I think, would speed up animating Smart LEDs for things like LEDTriks, Mega Trees, Arches, Spinners... etc.

The problem I've run in to is that every time I try to load a sequence I've created into LOR S3, I get errors.  I'm sure that it has to do with the formatting, but I haven't figued it out yet.

I can load an empty sequence in, but as soon as I start adding timings things go south in a hurry.

Oh, you are probably wondering what errors I'm getting (or maybe your not and you've moved on by now..    ):

I've gotten every thing from an "Invalid procedure call or argument" to  "Unexpected save file information found". 

I've stepped through the output, but I simply can not find where the issue is occuring.  I'm putting a link to my software here:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login



If you are interested in this at all, you can download the program called SLED.exe.  All the source code is there if anyone wants to take a look through it.  Its done in Delphi 2009.  There are some baseline LOR created .las in the sequences directory.

I think it will be a great project once I've figured out the export, but I've got to find out what goofy with the LOR XML.


Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

J

[dpitts]

What does your program do?

[MazdaFan]

Simply put, it builds an animation of RGB LEDs. 

As it stands now, you can create a matrix of LEDs of any size.  They are only set for horizontal orientation right now, but I want to put in vertical (Mega Trees.. corners of houses, etc) and radial (spinners) at a later date.

Press "new" to create a new grid.  It allows you to set your starting universe/channel, and define your grid of lights.
Once its created, you can select a color (Look for improvements in that area.. Its just basic right now), click on a "light", then move the animation forward a step.  You can use the keypad keys to move forward in the animation.  It moves the previous "light" in the direction (2-down, 4-left, 6-right, 8-up, and the diagonal keys .. 1, 3, 7. and 9) move in the appropriate direction.

Once you have your sequence created, you can play it back (File/Play), save the animation for later work and/or "export" it to an LOR .las file.  Thats the area where I'm having issues.

I've got some interesting plans for the software including being able to insert or delete frames anywhere in the animation, building a "buffer" that you can create a complete picture in and then scroll it into your grid.  Doing complete buffer swaps so that the grid appears to "flash" between what is on the grid and the buffer, being able to input text and have it convert to lights, and being able to create "shapes/objects" that you can save and paste into the grid/buffer.

 

[rrowan]

So basically what Nutcracker does 

Rick R.

[MazdaFan]

Basically... except that it doesn't require internet access nor Apache or PHP to be installed upon your computer.  Its compiled as native Win32 code so that it runs quickly and takes up very little space.

Oh, and the fact that Nutcracker doesn't do S3 either....

[keitha43]

I believe nutcracker does do s3.

Sent from my Thunderbolt using Tapatalk 2.

[rrowan]

Basically... except that it doesn't require internet access nor Apache or PHP to be installed upon your computer.  Its compiled as native Win32 code so that it runs quickly and takes up very little space.

Oh, and the fact that Nutcracker doesn't do S3 either....

Cool but I don't do S3 either 

Rick R.

[Jeffl]

Dennis Cherry would be the first one I would contact.

[smeighan]

Your program sounds interesting.

Have you looked at the newest version of xLights? It is available to download since it is open source. It can produce LOR lms files and it can read las files. With the latest release it can convert between lms,las, vix,xseq (This is xLights internal format) file formats.



It is written in C++

you can download it here
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

it is about 5 mbytes to download and does not use apache or mysql.

If you want your software to get a larger audience you should design an internal format and then convert to the
Vixen vix, vir
LOR lms,lcb,las
HLS hlsnc
LSP msq,asq,UserPatterns.xml

That way anyone can use it whatever their sequencer.

Nutcracker does everything above execpt for LOR las (never looked at it)
LSP msq,asq. This is the one i hope to fix this year.

I have an internal nutcracker file format that is just space delimited data.

Each line looks like this: String, Pixel, RGB data

S nn P pp RGB1  RGB2   RGB3

so it might look like

S1 P1 12345  432123  12342 43234234
S1 P2  3234    123123  0    1236125


Each row represents a pixel, not a channel. each row therefore has 3 channel worth of info. This is because i put out the 24 bit rgb values

a 3 minute song in nc form is 34mbytes, the same song in LOR lms is 350 mbytes. LSP UserPatterns.xml 1.2gbytes

I am hoping to influence LSP to be able to import a nc file.

I remember going through understanding lms and lcb. Dennis Cherry would be a good contact.
I would also download xLights from source forge and maybe see what he has.

thanks
sean

[MazdaFan]

Thank you all so much!  I'll download xLights and snoop through the code, and contact Dennis as well.

I had plans to output for vixen and LSP, but I just need to get the basics down first before I start moving in a different direction.  I'm not a programmer by trade, I'm an electrician/electronics tech.  Unfortunately, I'm all self taught so I tend to "learn" things as I need them.  I don't use the info enough to retain it, so I have to RE-learn it the NEXT time I need it     If I can get this all up and running hopefully the maintenance of the software will keep me brushed up.

Have a great day, and thanks for your help!
 

[smeighan]

I can see that you are writing your code in Pascal. That's cool.

as far as making a las file, that is just a lms file without sound. You can look at the nutcracker file
nutcracker/effects/make_lor.php
it makes both lms and lcb files.

There is also make_vixen, make_hls and make_lsp.php


you need to download nutcracker from github.


5) You now need to get a copy of the current Nutcracker code tree. Go to
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login and download the zip file. This file is updated daily with the latest Nutcracker code tree and with the latest export from meighan.net/nutcracker database
Unzip this file into c:\wamp\www\nutcracker if using WAMP
or
unzip it into c:\xampp\htdocs\nutcracker if you are using XAMPP


good luck

[MazdaFan]

Thank you Sean.  I'll download the nutcracker codebase and see if I can remember my way through php (Its only been about 20 years since I played with it). 

Yes, I'm doing my programming in Pascal, or Delphi (Turbo Pascal) to be precise.  It was the first compiled language that I learned, and it was just so DARN EASY to pick up!  I've looked into C, C++, C#... and pointers give me headaches. LOL   I did some programming with PERL, PHP, and MySQL back in the mid to late 90s, and they were great scripting languages but I wanted something that wasn't interpreted.  Stumbled on Delphi (Delphi 3 at the time) and been with it ever since.  I have been considering trying to locate an old version of C++ Builder to dabble with and see if I can comprehend it a little better now.

Again, thank you so much for all your help!

Jamie

[warspyder]

We used this free c++ compiler in class You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login , back in the 90's I was programming in COBOL

[MazdaFan]

We used this free c++ compiler in class You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login , back in the 90's I was programming in COBOL

Devcpp, as I recall, is part of the GNU compilers...  I could be mistaken though.  Anywho, I know  you can grab Codeblocks

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

and use it as an IDE for DevCPP as well as a lot of other compilers.

I was mainly interested in the Borland C++ builder because of the ease of creating a user interface with its Rapid Application Development (RAD) IDE.  Yes, I know that you still need to know the workings of how to pass pointers, create classes and objects, fill structures, etc... but once you learn that, its a lot easier to just click and drag the item you want and let the IDE take care of the code.