Just got my table this evening and am loving it! The only thing I can't figure out is how the "Spread" lighting mode works. Maybe I haven't started playing a track that makes it obvious yet, but if anyone can clue me in I'd be grateful.
Hi John,
Welcome to the community of Sisyphus owners! With the relatively recent addition of RGBW lighting, we've added another layer of "infinite canvas" to explore. Like sand tracks, there are endless possibilities of time-based patterns that can be displayed by the circumferential lighting. Each LED can be thought of as a pixel, and can be independently changed (both hue and brightness). However, unless you want to dive into Python code and created custom presets, there is no way to easily set up an interface allowing you to do so - so we currently have a few presets from which you can choose. "Spread" changes in accord to the ball's (head ball's, if you're running in 2-ball mode) position. You choose a primary hue / brightness, which follows the ball's Theta position (rotation). The size of this following "beacon" responds to the ball's Rho position (distance from center). At the center it is widest; at the periphery, it's narrowest. The secondary hue /brightness is the "background" (non-"beacon").
WOW! Thanks Bruce, and what a clever design for LED behavior!
On the subject of LED presets, I have no experience at all with Python, but whenever the world gets back to something approaching normalcy, one suggestion I had for the app in terms of LEDs is the ability to save colors so that they can be accessed via dropdown instead of having to maintain a file listing the hex codes of the colors you like so that you can retrieve them after experimenting with something else. I'm picturing an expansion where the color picker section of the app with the color wheel and sliders simply has a Save button that would allow you to save the current hex code with a custom name, and then there would be a dropdown with all of those custom names available, where selecting it would jump to that hex code -- but not click Save just in case the user wanted to fine tune from that "baseline".
In any case, I'm sure you've heard this many times over already, and I know I've barely scratched the surface at this stage, but this table truly is remarkable, Bruce. Many thanks to you and your team for bringing this into the world. 🙂
Bruce, I am really impressed with "Paint" mode; it is the one we run all the time here. It has so many subtle variations and surprises. Unlike just about everything else, I actually don't want to know how it works. It's strangely nice to have some technical mystery in my life. Kudos.
I too love Paint mode. I find myself using mostly White (highlights detail), Paint (great for high "delta Theta" tracks), and Rho Fade (great for high "delta Rho" tracks).
Dithermaster I don't want to spoil any mystery that you might want to keep in your life, so you might want to skip the rest of this post, but for anyone else who's curious, Paint involves a "brush color" that varies over time. As the ball moves around, it paints table regions with the currently active "brush color", and any region of the table that was painted a given color stays that color until the ball crosses that region again, at which point that region gets "painted over" with whatever brush color is now active. It's a very clever design that leads to some beautiful results. 🙂
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