Over this week-end, we finally agreed upon how we were going to deal with our big data throughput.

At first we wanted to take a MCU, but we noticed that if we use Wi-Fi and stream the data to our system, we needed to :

• Have a reliable Wi-Fi module that works properly in an environement where other 2.4Ghz frequencies are normally used. For instance, People usually carry their phones with Bluetooth a Wi-Fi connection active and this should not break our system.
• Be able to buffer the data before displaying as the Wi-Fi latency may vary. Without an external memory, an MCU cannot absorb much more than a few milliseconds of jitter.

Thus, we decided to take a System-On-Module instead. Ambroise talks about it in this post.

With now an FPGA, a dual-core ARM processor with FPU, embedded linux and 1GB of RAM, our system will be rather powerful. Thus, we are considering adding some drawing primitives directly on our system and not rely entirely on the computer to stream all the raw data.

Last time, I explained how I tried to make Blender work with VTK. I managed to voxelize a mesh and view every single voxel in the FIJI Visualization software. Unfortunately, the voxelization is done with a regular cubical grid, which is not what we want.

I succeeded into making a grid that represents our system : a cylinder which represents our 40×30 screen rotating on its Z-axis. On the cylindrical grid below, every white cell is meant to represent a LED on one of the 128 steps.

Now, I am trying to fill this grid with our mesh color data. Then, we simply need to extract each slice of the cylinder to know our LED configurations on each step.