Keyboard Builders' Digest / Tips & Tricks
Cyberpunk OLED glitch
A cool OLED glitch animation by Aleks with open-source firmware and bitmap frames.
Published November 21, 2021
Basically I just did a bunch of frames on gimp, exported them as bitmap images, then used https://javl.github.io/image2cpp/ to convert them to be usable to drive the oled. Then it's just a matter of randomly showing different images to make the glitch effect, with adding more during the transition to make it look nicer – Aleks.
Aleks was kind enough to publish both the firmware and the bitmap frames. According to him, the animation could be simplified by doing the glitch on the fly, but "I got lazy and went with separate frames".
The firmware is on the heavy side, so lot of features are disabled, and this is intended to be used only on the non master side of the keyboard.
Firmware files: https://gist.github.com/aleksbrgt/48a8eb932dc1b6aa8f4b36ecd7c380d0
Frame bitmaps: https://imgur.com/a/WKfJFRg
How long did it take to make the animation?
There is not a lot of frames so it was not too time consuming. I think it took me something like 1 hour to make a set of glitched images that looked good, taking the time to try them out on the oled and tuning them a lot.
The most inconvenient was to make the two base images. Just cropping and resizing existing ones did not produce good results, so they had to be redrawn from scratch.
And finally, the code part was the longest, not complex, but a lot of tuning to reach a point where I was happy with the amount of glitch, the transitions, etc. So in total I think it took me 2 to 3 hours.
Published on Sun 21st Nov 2021. Featured in KBD #53 (source).
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