Improvements and Further Development

Issues Encountered

Sound and Animation Simultaneity

Due to the sequential nature of the program, I had some issues having the power up and down sound effects playing alongside the corresponding animations. This was initially solved after implementing a state machine and assigning states to different functions i.e. fade in, fade out, and transition. However, after the integration of the IMU to implement swing, clash, and twirl functions, the synchronization between the sound and animation was lost.

Testing the Clash

Due to the physical state of my prototype, it was very difficult to test if the clash sound was fully functional. As a result there wasn’t much testing done with regards to the clash function.

Future Development

Additional sounds

Initial Power on sound after boot. Probably a spoken line from one of the films.

Introduction of random elements

The Teensy 4.x series include two Random Number Generator protocols natively. Each are designed for encryption useages, but they could be applied to any number of other programs. We envision using random numbers for one of these protocols into both the sound file playback and the RGB colour definitions to add subtle error from the original values. This could lead to an unstable or scintillating colour along the blade, and either more cacophanous or analog sounds from the file payback. Both of these features is purely aesthetic, and provides and interesting code challenge without changing the core functionality of the project.