More on Fields

A Project is made up of Sections, and Sections have Fields.

Project files can have as many as ten Sections, but nearly all the Sections are optional.

The Project files above contain three Sections: shape, run, and animation, and the animation Section contains two Fields, typename and colors.

The Project Sections are aliases, animation, colors, controls, driver, drivers, layout, numbers, palettes, path, run, and shape… but you might never use many of these.

Sections can have Fields - for example, the run Section above has the Field fps: 60.

The most important Sections are animation, shape, and driver, which appear in almost every Project:

animation

a program that changes your lights over time

shape

shows how your lights are laid out in 1, 2, or 3 dimensions

driver

configures and runs the driver that controls the actual lights

Class Sections and Value Sections

Sections naturally fall into two categories.

Value Sections are fairly simple things like strings, numbers, lists, or dictionaries.

The Value Sections are aliases, colors, numbers, palettes, path, run, and shape.

Class Sections represent Python objects - actual programs. Nearly all the excitement in BiblioPixel is in the Class Sections!

There are five Class Sections: animation, controls, driver, drivers and layout.

Each Class Section has a special Field typename containing the name of its Python Class.

The Python Class determines what that Section does, and which Fields can be set on it. The typename field lets you load not just BiblioPixel code, but your own code or third-party code.

BiblioPixel comes with a large number of predefined Animations, Controls, Drivers and Layouts, and you can put them together and customize them simply by writing a Project, without any programming.

More, if you know a little Python you can extend them or modify a copy, or just write your own from scratch.

More on Fields

Each Section has named Fields - values that you can set in that Section.

In Example 2 and 3 above, the run Section has the Field fps with value 60 (fps meaning “frames per second”), and the animation Section has the Field imagePath with value /Users/tom/Documents/giphy-zoom.gif.

A Value Section always has the same Fields - for example, the run Section always has the fps Field in any Project.

On the other hand, a Class Section will have different Fields depending on its typename.

For example, many Animations have no Fields at all and do exactly one thing, like the Animation .tests.PixelTester:

Example 1: An Animation that runs a simple test on a strip of 32 pixels

shape: 32
animation:
    typename: .tests.PixelTester

On the other hand, the .sequence Animation requires a Field animations, a list of Animations that are played in sequence. It also has an optional Field length which sets the length of each subsequence.

Example 2: This Animation runs four Animations, each for two seconds, in a

loop, and displays the result on a 32x32 pixel display.

shape: [32, 32]

animation:
    typename: .sequence
    length: 2
    animations:
        - $bpa.matrix.ImageAnim
        - $bpa.matrix.ImageShow
        - $bpa.matrix.ImageDissolve
        - $bpa.matrix.ScreenGrab

---

shape: [64, 11]
animation: $bpa.strip.HalvesRainbow