Release 4.0.26

[smeighan]

release 4.0.26

Well; Dan came back from his cruise and has checked in his new code.
This release is courtesy of Dan Kulp.

Dan made a youtube video explaining how the new feature works.

Very Cool Dan!


Dan Wrote: "Earlier, I posted a teaser screenshot of the node/strand effect editing that I was working on.  I'm now back from vacation and was able to push all the changes to github and got enough stuff working to create a short (17 minutes, so not really short) introduction of what I'm trying to do with it and what currently works (and what doesn't, found a bug while recording):"

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watch the video to learn the new capability. Basically, you can now expose the channels that make up a model and drop different effects on each.

Possibilities expand!

XLIGHTS/NUTCRACKER RELEASE NOTES:
---------------------------------
4.0.26  Apr 28, 2015
    -- enh (dkulp) New ability to add effects to individual stands and nodes
    -- enh (dkulp) Ability to see current colors/status of individual nodes
    -- bug (dkulp) Disable "Quit" during rendering as that causes a crash
    -- enh (dkulp) Widen the top of the tree a little bit
    -- enh (dkulp) Add ability to specify the display names for strands and nodes

[PJNMCT]

Wow Dan, very nice.

It's nice to get not only the look and feel of xlights/nutcracker but also a little bit of a grid for groups feel.
...a little more precision like you state in the video.
I think it helps most of us that aren't completely converted to just dropping effects without some control over pixels/channels to feel a little more in control.

You guys are just way crazy! in a good way!

 

Thanks for all your time and effort.
-Paul

[rrowan]

Wow

You guys are doing awesome work. We are all very appreciative of the hard work everyone is doing.

To be honest I would love to see how Dan did he singing Snowmen (construction) along with how it works with XL4.
I am still mostly AC lights and not RGB except for my window frames. I am hoping to get some more rgb lights and Zeus 16 this year to play with.

Thanks

Rick R.

[dkulp]

To be honest I would love to see how Dan did he singing Snowmen (construction) along with how it works with XL4.
I am still mostly AC lights and not RGB except for my window frames. I am hoping to get some more rgb lights and Zeus 16 this year to play with.

The singing snowman is just the snowman from HolidayCoro.com:

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Not really any different than the Singing Christmas trees.   Instead of using 120V incans though, I wired it with individual 5mm flat top LED's setup for 24V DC.   I then used 4 DM-103 controllers from Ray to control the 12 channels.   See my review at:

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Those are just normal 3 channel DMX controllers.   Nothing major.  In "cascade mode", it "looks" like a single 12 channel controller.

Would I recommend most people doing that?  No.   It's a TON of work to place and solder a 1000 LED's, over 100 resistors, etc...   But I needed it to be super light weight to hang on my vinyl siding.    I've attached pictures.

As far as running in xLights, don't really know yet.  :-)    I used HLS to sequence those parts of my display the last two years.   I'm HOPING to be able to do more of that in xLights this year and the addition of the individual node control was the first important step toward that.   To be honest, most of what I did for them was buy "Singing Tree" sequences, import them into HLS, adjust them a bit, and then export to hlsIdata which I then brought into xLights to overlay any pixel effects.   I'm hoping to be able to "import" those LMS sequences directly into xLights nodes where I can do the adjustments there and avoid HLS.      There is the Papayago stuff in xLights which should work fine, but I've never looked at it. (and the singing sequences are generally cheap enough that it's not worth my time messing with it.  Let someone else do it.)

[smeighan]

today you can use the Papagayo program.
you will find the program on the xlights page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

you themn take your Papagayo file (*.pgo) and run it through the Papagayo tab of xlights. This will convert it into 3 types of different singing faces
1) A face is created on your megatree or matrix
2) You create 10 images with the mouth shape matching the 10 syllables needed
3) You map each syllable to a channel for Holiday Coro type of faces

so one input, three different ways to get output.

The Papagayo tab of xlights will finally produce an xml file that calls the correct effects and when you play it, Singing faces,