Changes to Meteor Effect?

[tomioe]

Hello everyone,

I have had great community help previously with building my Atomic Fire Lamp a few years ago, so cheers to all the contributors of this repo. Dave - I am in awe of this project you've created and so thankful that you decided to make it open to everyone.

I recently built a new NightDriverStrip lamp, and I had initially hoped to copy the exact same effects that my first lamp had. Most of the effects were a simple matter of copy-pasting them, but there is one effect in particular that I cannot replicate.

The entry I have on the Atomic Lamp's effects.cpp is this (I built it in 2022):

new MeteorEffect(), // Rainbow palette

From the GET /getEffectList, I get this response:

{
  "currentEffect": 6,
  "millisecondsRemaining": 232316,
  "effectInterval": 300000,
  "enabledCount": 11,
  "Effects": [
[..]
    {
      "name": "Meteor Effect",
      "enabled": true
    },
[...]
  ]
}

And it looks like this visually: https://imgur.com/eDhcMdX

Translating the same effect into my new lamps' 2025 repo, and I get this for effects.cpp:

ADD_EFFECT(EFFECT_STRIP_METEOR, MeteorEffect);

and this is the response from GET /getEffectList:

{
  "currentEffect": 6,
  "millisecondsRemaining": 502517,
  "eternalInterval": false,
  "effectInterval": 600000,
  "Effects": [
[...]
    {
      "name": "Color Meteors",
      "enabled": true,
      "core": true
    }
  ]
}

However, visually it is quite different: https://imgur.com/bDnaIye

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong here? I couldn't see any impactful changes to meteoreffect.h . I suspect that the MeteorEffect on my Atom lamp is actually something different...

[rbergen]

@tomioe I looked into this somewhat, and since 2022 a lot has changed within the NightDriverStrip codebase.

I actually looked at the differences in meteoreffect.h since then and now, and I noticed some code changes in the effect were in fact made. You say these changes aren't impactful, but I'm not exactly sure what the definition of "impactful" is in this context.

Aside from that, I also know that various changes to the processing of audio input have been made over the past 3 years. If those can serve as an explanation for the differences in the visuals, I don't know.

I can say that the differences between the JSON blobs you shared are immaterial. The effect name changed (as reflected in the effect's code commits), the standard effect change interval changed from 30 to 60 seconds, and the concept of "core effects" got introduced somewhere along the way. None of those changes have any impact on the visuals that effects generate.

[tomioe]

Hi there,

Exactly, the effect interval stuff was really just to show that the output was "sane", wholly agree that its naming is not relevant here.

When I went through the commit history, I didn't see any major changes to the drawing logic of meteoreffects.h . So although there were plenty of changes, none of them had should have had such a major impact on the visuals. I am also not using any audio input on my lamps, but thanks for mentioning that.

The commits that could have influenced this, I found them to be:

939f1c8

1344a78

ecd5a2f

That last commit is probably the one with the most important changes, but I tried implementing the same code into my new lamp, and the results were the almost the same. I think my conclusion is, that I have probably flashed a different effect or the effect parameters are somehow changed, and I just have the wrong code on my disk.

One thing I found, is that for the codebase of my Atom Light, the file path is actually ./include/effects/meteoreffect.h, which changed in this commit: 04b38e7#diff-1019a9061982fef815bf68ad10bdbf27af07c3bc6fa72d53a88f66b5e755afb8 - so indeed, this is a super old code base.

Thank you for taking your time to check this out, and thank you for all the work you've put into this project as well!