One last amendment as the playback routines are written.
All our animations are simply lists of events that happen a specific time after the user has pressed a button (or sent a signal) to start the animation playback.
The PIC keeps a running timer of the time elapsed since playback started, and a list of events and when they need to happen. The list is already sorted into time order (by the host PC before downloading).
The PIC microcontroller simply compares the current time to the time of the next animation in the list. If the current time is greater or equal to the time of the event in the list, it plays out the animation (moves the servo) off the top off the current "stack" of animations, then moves onto the next one.
This approach allows the PIC to catch up with any missed "frames" - in fact this is an important approach, since three things happening at exactly the same time will actually be processed in sequence, one after the other, but very quickly.
Anyway, this leads us to the latest amend:
Timecodes are stored as two-byte values (any number from 0 to 65,535).
At the minute we're storing times as milliseconds from the start. While this is pretty accurate for playback, in reality, we're more likely to want things to move within seconds or half-seconds of each other, not 1/1000th of a second.
If we stick to storing our animation timecodes as milliseconds, the maximum value we can store is 65,535 milliseconds - 65 seconds. The longest animation would be just over a minute long.
By simply storing timecodes as 1/10th seconds (so one second is represented by 10, two seconds by 20 and so on) we can perform animations with timings as low as 1/10th second, but also increase our playback times incredibly.
If the maximum value possible is 65,535 represents 6,535 seconds, this is a massive 108.916 minutes - or 1hr 48min and 55sec of animation!
The software and PIC firmware will be updated shortly with this amendment.
Following the examples given in a previous post, the data written as
servo 500,09,120
servo 500,10,120
servo 2000,09,050
servo 2000,10,200
servo 4000,09,200
servo 5000,10,060
tloop 6000,1000
...is now converted into
0,5,0,9,120 (500 milliseconds = 5 * 1/10th second)
0,5,0,10,120
0,20,0,9,50
0,20,0,10,200
0,40,0,9,200
0,50,0,10,60
0,60,1,0,10
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