SomethingUnreal | Dot matrix printer interface: Software (feature demo / IRC) @SomethingUnreal | Uploaded 10 years ago | Updated 12 hours ago
The printer is a new, colour Epson LQ-300+II this time. Sorry in advance - I was tired after spending the whole night coding. Here's the program I made to send Epson's ESC/P 2 commands to a compatible printer and do fancy stuff such as change effects, colour, size, and even send non-ASCII characters as graphics in the middle of ASCII text. It's still a long way from a usable text editor, though.
The program can also monitor plain-text log files and print new lines of text as they are saved. Here, it prints off live chat logs from 4 IRC channels. I optimised it a little for IRC logs, so that it can print different parts in different colours. I considered making it monitor my web server's log file, but visiting certain pages on my site can add dozens of lines at once to the log file, which would waste a whole sheet of paper in seconds.
My program uses a USB interface, which I made with an Arduino, to communicate with the printer. The Arduino passes printer status info to the laptop, such as "error" or "paper out", and forwards data from the laptop to the printer's parallel port if the printer is ready.
I'm using a different, brand-new printer this time because it turns out that the other, second-hand printer had a bad head with 2 or 3 dead pins, causing blank lines in the print-out. I actually recorded several videos on the progress of cleaning the printer and its head, and was able to fix one of the pins, but 1 or 2 never came back to life, so it'd make a bit of an anticlimactic video that I might not upload. By the way, I recorded the pins firing in slow-motion, and one was very slow while the other didn't move at all. I uploaded the video here: youtube.com/watch?v=zk3iJJ9PpDY
PREVIOUS PART - HARDWARE:
youtube.com/watch?v=PfhKc0gSNIw
The printer is a new, colour Epson LQ-300+II this time. Sorry in advance - I was tired after spending the whole night coding. Here's the program I made to send Epson's ESC/P 2 commands to a compatible printer and do fancy stuff such as change effects, colour, size, and even send non-ASCII characters as graphics in the middle of ASCII text. It's still a long way from a usable text editor, though.
The program can also monitor plain-text log files and print new lines of text as they are saved. Here, it prints off live chat logs from 4 IRC channels. I optimised it a little for IRC logs, so that it can print different parts in different colours. I considered making it monitor my web server's log file, but visiting certain pages on my site can add dozens of lines at once to the log file, which would waste a whole sheet of paper in seconds.
My program uses a USB interface, which I made with an Arduino, to communicate with the printer. The Arduino passes printer status info to the laptop, such as "error" or "paper out", and forwards data from the laptop to the printer's parallel port if the printer is ready.
I'm using a different, brand-new printer this time because it turns out that the other, second-hand printer had a bad head with 2 or 3 dead pins, causing blank lines in the print-out. I actually recorded several videos on the progress of cleaning the printer and its head, and was able to fix one of the pins, but 1 or 2 never came back to life, so it'd make a bit of an anticlimactic video that I might not upload. By the way, I recorded the pins firing in slow-motion, and one was very slow while the other didn't move at all. I uploaded the video here: youtube.com/watch?v=zk3iJJ9PpDY
PREVIOUS PART - HARDWARE:
youtube.com/watch?v=PfhKc0gSNIw
![[MIDI] (Guitars+Bass+Drums only) JUMPING!! (Kin-iro Mosaic OP)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p-KIekYxr-c/hqdefault.jpg "[MIDI] (Guitars+Bass+Drums only) JUMPING!! (Kin-iro Mosaic OP)
Because I concentrated so much on the guitars while making this MIDI, here they are playing by themselves. Well, I also kept the bass because its fun, and the drums because I can.
Full version is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kptqzXlMnjs")
![[HD] Chen Nyan Poi~! Chen Nyan Fail! Fail!](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p8YIikaJW74/hqdefault.jpg "[HD] Chen Nyan Poi~! Chen Nyan Fail! Fail!
Yeah... A rushed attempt by me of Chen Nyan Poi on the piano (well, keyboard). I had to have it done by a certain day for somone, and I guess I had been too lazy with practising, but being fail has never stopped other things of mine from being uploaded.
Chen Nyan Poi is a remix by IOSYS of the theme of Chen (stage 2 boss in Touhou 07: Perfect Cherry Blossom).
Anyway, not much more to say here, except that I actually recorded this over 3 weeks ago and had forgotten to upload it until now. orz")
![StepMania LED Message Display + Lilies Line (AAA) [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pE4NADnvup8/hqdefault.jpg "StepMania LED Message Display + Lilies Line (AAA) [HD]
A few days ago I bought a nice LED message display, and after finding out what data to send to it to control it (without using the sucky software which it came with), I have something new to work with StepMania! ^^
My program controlling the display works by reading StepManias log file to see what youre doing on StepMania. However, StepMania only updates its log file when its built up enough text to write (to avoid making the hard drive do unnecessary work), which means that my program sometimes doesnt realise whats happening (or doesnt until its too late). At the end of a song (when StepMania shows Failed or Cleared) is when this happens the most.
Unfortunately, detailed gameplay info (for example, how many Greats you got, or what your longest combo was) is not written to the log file. orz
The voice which announces the name of the song is just pre-recorded audio files, and I havent recorded files for all songs. As you will hear, only the first 2 songs have their names announced.
Also, I forgot to set my camcorders focus to manual, so the flashing of my StepMania lights messes up the autofocus a bit. Sorry xD
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
EDIT:
Info for programmers (data to send to display):
Text: http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/information/LEDD/LED_display_code.txt
Graphics: http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/information/LEDD/LEDD_graphics.txt")
![[MIDI] Kill Me Baby ED (with animation) [SC-88Pro]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qrhnjT8MYWo/hqdefault.jpg "[MIDI] Kill Me Baby ED (with animation) [SC-88Pro]
I couldnt resist trying to recreate the amusing dance at the end of the anime Kill Me Baby on this Sound Canvass LCD, so that meant I had to make a MIDI of the music, too! This is the ending theme, Futari no Kimochi no Honto no Himitsu, originally sung by Tamura Mutsumi and Akasaki Chinatsu.
Never call a song simple until youve tried to make a MIDI of it. And trying to remake the inaccurate timings of the toms took a silly amount of effort. That said, this MIDI only took 2 days to make, and a third of that was spent on the animations. I ended up making a program to draw on which spits out the SysEx messages to control the synths LCD, because I didnt fancy wearing out half of the buttons on the synth by drawing pictures on it (yes, the synth has a drawing mode - I guess Roland had some spare ROM to play with). Manually putting the commands to buffer and display every frame at the right time (there are 48 different frames) into the MIDI file was tedious.
I have released the program which generates SysEx messages to control the Sound Canvass LCD! If youre interested, please see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZLGj-4fWO4
You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi/")
![[AAA] StepMania: Kuru Kuru Lovely Day [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rfCuIgITPCA/hqdefault.jpg "[AAA] StepMania: Kuru Kuru Lovely Day [HD]
I hadnt uploaded a new StepMania video in quite a long time, and I surprised myself at being able to AAA this, so I decided to record myself trying to do it again. After about 6 more frustrating attempts, I finally managed. Unfortunately, people were trying to sleep at the time I was recording, so I had to keep fairly quiet (apart from the unavoidable tapping sounds, of course...). This also meant I had to play on headphones, so I mixed the songs audio in afterwards (although I normally do that anyway).
Note that the theme Im using, CyberiaStyle 4, shows
A- for A,
A+ for AA,
AA for AAA and
AAA for AAAA.
You can see more info about this theme (for SM 3.9), and download it, from the authors site, here:
http://cyberiastyle.skr.jp/cyberiastyle/cyberia4.html
This song is actually from the opening of an H-game called 「魔界天使ジブリール3」 (Makai Tenshi Jiburiiru 3). In this video, I play it as part of the Otakus Dream 2nd Hentai Mix song pack. You can find out more info about tha pack, and find download links for it, here:
http://otakusdream.com/")
![[MIDI] Ayumi Hamasaki - M (Above & Beyond Remix) [SC-88Pro]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/s7pTnsJ67iw/hqdefault.jpg "[MIDI] Ayumi Hamasaki - M (Above & Beyond Remix) [SC-88Pro]
This time, I tried to remake a trance song for the Roland Sound Canvas synth! I first heard this song many years ago on an internet radio site and became addicted to it, although I didnt know its name. I re-found it about 4 years later in a StepMania song pack.
This was surprisingly easy to make, despite having a few things that Ive not used much before (delay echoes, changing of resonance over time, reversed kick). It took 6 days in total, but the majority of the work was done in the first 4 days.
You can download all of my SC-88Pro MIDIs here:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/88pmidi/")
![[Touhou] Native Faith - Custom StepMania Lights At Night!](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sJdU1IqUvJ0/hqdefault.jpg "[Touhou] Native Faith - Custom StepMania Lights At Night!
Someone wanted to see them playing a song with a difficulty 15 step chart, so here they are blasting out Native Faith (Suwako Moriyas theme) to the rest of the street. =P
Ive tried to compensate for YouTubes tendancy to make the video become ahead of the audio, so hopefully the audio/video should be in sync this time.
The reason why the view from outside missed out on the first flash is because I made a program to start the lights on a timer (since I was with the cam), but it didnt work perfectly. xD
I apologise for the strange blockiness which appears momentarily throughout the video its because my camcorder needs its head cleaning. Its not visible on most of my videos, but since the picture changes from bright to dark so quickly here, its much more obvious.
This simfile can be found in the 4th Touhou StepMania pack, and the 3rd and 4th packs can be downloaded from here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FTLLIEVU
(371.8 MB!)
Lights are controlled by my StepMania Player program:
http://somethingunreal.homeip.net/blog/?page_id=84#smp")
