Hello!
For my xLights expansion this year I am thinking about making lightweight window frames with either RGB pixel bullets or IP rated RGB pixel tape. I want to do it in the style of a 16 segment LED per window. Think of a normal 7 segment "8" but with an asterisk so it can do alpha characters as well. I am an pinball guy, and this is similar to old pinball displays.
I understand I think how to make the models and set up addressing.
What would be the best approach to being able to input text and animate it on such a model setup.
I was looking into the singing mouths effects but I don't think I can bend that enough.
So far I have a few ideas:
1. True type font that is similar to the segments. Scrolling wouldn't work I don't think since I need to rotate the entire monospace character per step. I could input text like " ", " t", " te", " tes", "test", "est ", "st ", "t ", type thing to scroll text in this manner.
2. Video file behind the segments. This might be an approach if I can generate a video file with freetype in linux by script or something. Would be difficult to do in a normal non-linear editor unless I can use Davinci Resolve with an machine generated XML config file or something. I don't like the difficulty in modifying this type of effect though.
3. Is there some other way to achieve this that I don't know about :-)
Thanks in advance for any pointers!!
