I’ve made significant progress on my project so far this week. Visually it doesn’t look like much at the moment since much of what I’ve been doing is getting the technical aspects of my project worked out. I’ve written all of the code that reads an MP3 file, processes it to create the spectrogram for the visualization, and then plays the audio while sending colors to the LEDs. It took a while to figure out how to properly process the audio so that you could see different frequencies at least somewhat clearly in the colors of the LEDs. Fadecandy definitely made controlling and wiring the LEDs a lot easier though (I was using Arduino initially and it was slow and difficult).
Here’s a quick demo of what I have so far (sorry you can’t hear the audio so I had to play it alongside a video of the song). In the video you can see I just covered the LEDs with some white paper napkins to diffuse the light a bit. I think I definitely want to have some kind of covering on them like this in the end, but obviously something a little more permanent. The bare LEDs are almost painfully bright and piercing, so diffusing the light they give off is definitely necessary.
And here’s a screenshot of the program running, showing some graphs that I’ve been using for debugging (click to enlarge):
I’m proud of what I have so far, but I think there’s a lot that can be improved. Right now the signal is much too noisy, I’d like for it to be easier to pick out individual sounds in the colors. For example, sounds like lyrics or piano tend to get drowned out by bass and drum instruments, I’d like for them to be more separate.
This demo also only uses a single LED strip. Next I’d like to try using an LED grid, and then after that maybe try and build my own custom LED setup. The software is pretty much done except for some tweaking of the signal processing parts, I just have to figure out how I want the hardware setup to look.
In terms of parts I still need to purchase, I already have the Fadecandy controller and power supply, so if I were going to change the LED setup to something more complicated I would need: