solari project on limelight

The last tidbit of info in my previous blog post talked about a small Limelight project for SCNA. I'm going to talk about it now in detail. Yesterday, Micah brought up the idea of creating a program to select names out of the list of SCNA attendees for the book giveaways. He wanted it to look like a game or something entertaining, so for whatever reason, I thought about the old departure boards. You know, the ones that flap and create that unique sound. After a bit of googling, I found out an Italian manufacturer, Solari, created most of these boards. People usually refer to it as a Solari departure board or split flap display.

Micah and I paired for most of the day, first creating the randomizer and making sure winners won't be pulled again. Then I looked into finding a recording of the flap sound each character on the board makes. I could not find an isolated recording, but did find a field recording of the sound effect. I loaded it up on Audacity, cut a piece of it so it only plays back a single flap, and we ran it for almost all letters of the winner's name. I say almost because there were some collisions in the sound if a good number of them were being played at the same time. After fiddling around with the sound effects, we found it to be pretty satisfying. I don't know about you, but I think the split flap displays not only are visually pleasing to the eye, but also sound cool. Micah worked on the rest of the program, putting in nice visual touches and making the button look really cool. If you're attending SCNA, you'll obviously get to see it. I'll post a picture of it after the conference.

Book Reading

For the rest of the day, I'm going to pack for the conference and catch up on some reading. More on that later.