program needed

[--weezl--]

long story short, I have an idea for a visual effect/light display, in my head, and I need to make it visual, so I can see what it will actually look like, like, to see if it will look the same as I think it will... What I am trying to find, is a program or website or something, that will allow me to have a light flash on and off, at a random interval, with preset limits to how long the intervals can be, IE:

I want a light to turn on and off, and I want the duration of on, and off to be random, but I want it to be neither on nor off, for longer than 1 second, nor shorter than 1/10th of a second (or whatever I set it to be) the ability to have multiples of these displaying at a time, would be ideal.

instead of lights, just a box or a picture changing color (as long as it shows black or white, and another color) on my monitor would be fine, basically I just want to see how several random lights next to each other look

anyone have any ideas? I spent about 3 hours on google looking for something, I found a few schematics to make things that will do basically what I want, but no limits to duration

also, if I can't just click "random" but have to enter in a sequence of how long before the next switch, that's fine too, I can make that work

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

I don't know if learning programing might be what you really need, but I have been using https://www.khanacademy.org/cs
It is free and seems to be simple enough for me to do. It may not be quick enough for what you want though but that is up to you.
I've been using khan acadamy to upgrade my math skills for college and it has been great.

Richard

 

[--weezl--]

thanks for the link, I checked it out, it looked a little greek to me (or dare I say, it looked a little c++ to me! lol )

however browsing that site, it did give me an idea that WILL work!

ok, first thing I need to do, is go to a random integer sequence, and get a sequence of numbers that is between 2 and 12 (these numbers explained later) this will relate to frames, next, I take those numbers, and label them alternating with I and O (on and off) which looks something like this:

3 i
12 o
10 i
8 o
7 i
9 o
6 i
7 o

except my list is 160 numbers long.

now, I take that, and make this the sequence for light 1, in binary, which would look something like:

i
i
i
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i

and so on, this list is 96 frames long (this came just because I felt like stopping here) now I repeat this, for multiple lights, making it look like this: (this is 3 lights)

o i i
o i i
o i o
o i o

then, I transfer that into a simpler numerical sequence, which will look something like this: (this is for above binary)
23
23
2
2

then I transfer that to a jpeg image that I have drawn in ms paint, with the design I am planning on doing, which will have 6 lights, this, (if my math is right) will come up with a maximum of 64 different jpeg files needed, before every possible pattern is drawn. then, I will upload these files to an animated gif website, and with my 96 frames, playing at 5ms per frame (20 fps) this will give me a 4.8 second clip of my idea... those numbers i mentioned earlier, 2 and 12, those are my timing limits, the min being 2 frames at 50ms per frame, gives me 0.1 seconds, and the 12 gives me 0.6 seconds

a lot of work, but I somehow think it will be less work than learning how to write coding...


going to be so much work... i'm done the binary for the first 3 of 6 lights

 

[--weezl--]

well shit, 3.5 hours later, i'm done, and it doesn't look great at all... might look better with 10 lights instead of 6, but it's hard to say... I can only imagine that each additional light will probably double the amount of time it takes to do this, so 10 lights might take me something like 14 hours...

 

[Mark_88]

This is why code programmers love cut and paste...but not sure if that would work in what you are doing...almost nobody does anything from scratch these days...because somewhere, someone has done something similar that can be copied...