Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Over to You
Well, that comes to the end of my bit but not of your bit. You can extend and improve this in
many ways. You can use transistors or FETs to drive longer LED strips and have many of
them on all the time. You can extend the software to save your sequence in a ile. hen make
it so you can save diferent patterns in diferent iles. You can implement a shift function
where you can concatenate several sequences to make a much longer one and even display an
extended sequence by drawing the new pattern when the old one is done. Better yet you
could have the display scrolling. Or make the window bigger and the boxes smaller to it
more steps in.
You can add some software that keeps the sequence kicking over if you have switched to an
external input and have not had a trigger for a certain amount of time. You could add a small
delay after an external trigger to stop them from happening too rapidly. You can add an extra
control button to set the sequence to a random pattern.
On the hardware side, you might have noticed that the dynamic range of some music makes
it drop out of the trigger zone. here are special ampliiers called
gated compressors;
they are
made so that things like walkie-talkies have a constant audio signal into the transmitter. he
gain of the ampliier is adjusted automatically to keep the output constant. he SSM2165 is
one example of such an ampliier.
You might want to replace the envelope follower's discharge resistor with a pot, something
like 220K. Finally you might want to adjust the ilter capacitor, or even have a more sophisti-
cated second or fourth order ilter on the input. However, whatever you do, keep on dancing.
