5-25-2024: LEDs
This blog about the topic of dashing the RGB pixel to the real electronic LED. Noticing that art can be also at work with LEDs !!!!!!!! Out of the canvas space.
At the corner of 18th st and Kst, the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill building (1801K) shows a unique animated LED that is worth to visit.
erratum: mistake of the pedestrian, above statement is not exact because, the LED panel is NOT at 1801K, but at 1800K, across the street. However, the SOM building remains at 1801K. [artgraphic-db] does NOT have the complete information about this LEDs panel, but, with no doubt the 1800K corner panel has something to see with SOM skills.
Worth to mention is the format of the panel, covering an horizontal stripe around the corner, on 18th st AND Kst, over about 10ft to 15 ft, maybe, by 1 foot. Animated street walkers, parading, support a weight loss and vitality message.
Thus, LED panels are alternatives to more sophisticated ways to monitor bit based information, like, for instance, computer screens. Computer screens are also LED panels, in fact.
What type of LED is needed to replace a failed LED on a screen? The first thing to be sure of, is what type of display is used, "both displays use liquid crystals to help create an image. The difference is in the backlights. While a standard LCD monitor uses fluorescent backlights, an LED monitor uses light-emitting diodes for backlights." (Nov 18, 2020).
(draft: read)
- their programming capabilities, say doing math, or more precisely using math formulas (simple additions or arithmetic on sets of data, like an historical expense record),
- plotting capabilities (making plots to visualize trends of data) and,
- formatting (tailoring numbers or text, inputs or operation results, to any size or color).
In brief, a spreadsheet can rejoice us, even the artist, if it used to handle data, and mine them, eventually after their creation, or their making. For instance, it is easy to represent a column of data considered as numbers, from, say, 1 to 1000. Or, more sophisticated, a spreadsheet can be used to sequence numbers according to any aspiration, 1;2 1;2 ... 1;2 on a line from a starting column, indexed according to a letter, to another column (because travelling on a given line, columns pass by from a defined starting cell to a ending cell).
The very first cell, top left of the spreadsheet, has indexes A1 (column A, line 1).
It is a very pleasant starting thing to use the keyboard, after the mouse has positioned us in the spreadsheet, on a desired cell, and just input something, like a number, like, say "1", for instance.
The spreadsheet has different modes or ways of considering inputs. It can be text, like, say "hi". Also, the number "1" can be considered as a number, as "1" is usually considered by all of us, or the spreadsheet can consider the number "1", not as a number, but as text. If the latter, "1" becomes the text "1". It is the matter of formatting cells to tell the spreadsheet how to consider what is in a cell.
The formatting can just help to decide that the number "1" has to be considered as a date. In this case, "1" is just changed to a date. In the date-space, "1" is "12/31/1899", as the informaticians people of Google have decided.
In addition, formatting refers also to the presentation of what is in the cell. It is about the font, the size, the color of the text, the filling of the cell, the borders (the frame), and so on...
The very special feature of the spreadsheet is, of course, the exciting possibility to use formulas, allowing to tune numbers, or change them, or handle them according to user requirements and creation and imagination. How it works? In fact the numbers themselves cannot be changed. They must be considered as a useable basis on which other numbers are elaborated. Thus, a very simple useable basis is just a number "1" inserted in a cell.
On this basis, a formula can refer to this value, in this cell, and just allow to create another number like, "2", for instance. In this case the formula is just, =A1+1, entered in any other cell of the spreadsheet, if the number "1" is in the cell "A1". Not that how the spreadsheet recognizes a formula, sign "=", and performs an operation.
There is a very wide possibility to create formulas, and in the spreadsheet, it is the matter of the functions (INSERT>FUNCTION) to allow to compute new numbers.
In the case of the spreadsheet shared for the purpose of this blog, certain capabilities of the spreadsheet editor were used:
The editor by itself has a menu allowing the user to choose different contexts, like, for instance the context "View", which has nothing to see with the spreadsheet itself. It is a very common capability, in any app or software, to facilitate interactions between the user and the machine, or the app (or software), to HAVE a menu option able to change the view modes, zooming, or covering the full screen; The point here is that passing in full screen (back to the normal view by using ESC of the keyboard) changes what the app shows, and for us will make disappear what one calls the tool bar;
In the "VIEW" context of the menu, or, as a shortcut on the toolbar, the user or user-viewer can change the zoom level, 100%, or 75%, or 50% (that will allow in our case to make our dancer smaller, and to see the "picture" as a whole without the need to scroll;
The spreadsheet is in fact a spreadsheetS, and it is that simple to add new sheets and rename them;
The spreadsheets were renamed with the intention to point out how the file has been organized, inspired by the device design itself, having a memory, in which some information is stored for a further use, and for instance, and our case, for a display (happening in the sheet "display" of the spreadsheet, and by the magic of the computer, happening on a monitor, displaying an environment and the software in a certain state, in fact, showing the sheet "display" and an array of cells, themselves in a certain state, or format);
For the purpose of the spreadsheet presentation, a few cells have been merged to a single cell;
The context "EDIT" of the menu have allowed to copy/paste, either values, or formats, or formulas, to create the five frames stored in the sheet "memory";
All the pictures (arrays of 32 by 51) are made of arrays of 0 or 1;
Conditional formatting allowed to fill in black cells of values "1", and to fill in white cells with value "0";
The sheet "display" shows each picture, retrieved from memory according to cases -function "=IFS(" -, and the number entered by the user (for instance, the user can enter the number "3", and the related picture will be displayed).
Also, the different pictures were simply made by copy/pasting and flipping values by sorting according to an additional index; However the sorting is allowed by columns, not by lines, and it was necessary to "transpose" the values of interest before sorting; Then a simple re-"transpose" allowed to change back lines to columns;
The intention was to make a small animation, in the spreadsheet, and to display the frames automatically from 1 to 5 and so on.
However, it is a failure for the following reasons:
I wanted to keep it simple without the use of macros, that requires a level beyond the average artist amateur level;
However, I guess a good way to step forward with macros is to adapt the stopwatch (below), by changing the pictures based on a count down (as an example, the anime below, has 200ms intervals);
Another problem is, wanting to keep it simple, without macros, the user programmer of the spreadsheet is confronted to the constraints of the spreadsheet including, the fact that the formatting is done ONCE the calculation of the sheet is over (confronting to another problem on how to format within a loop), the call to functions that are said “volatile”, that are not recalculated automatically, and that the recalc setting cannot be smaller than a minute, the recursivity, that can be handled, but not very clearly in the case of a case that is not numerical, plus the problem of the maximum iteration number, that is too low (10000), also when wanting to use the nice user function capability (that allows recursivity).
Finally, the anime below, is made by using a video editor called capcut (https://www.capcut.com/).
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