#gwts

[Image description: a half body drawing of Scar in his season 7 mayoral outfit, reaching a diamond floating inside a large bubble above him. The background is lavender with blue, pink and white diagonal stripes. End description]

I've made a habit this year of downloading each hermit's skins for easy color picking and inspiration for the future, and Scar has just. so many cool outfits and characters, it was hard to choose! Also I don't know why the diamond ended up looking like it's in a Steven Universe bubble, lol.

The Wizard of Magical Mountain

My one bit of fanart that I did during this season of Last Life: Red Life Scar!! :D

His design is inspired by @insanitydog25 ‘s awesome cosplay, so do check them out! :))

So... I’ve been working from the theory that they must be using an existing LED driver chip/protocol/library, and just trying to learn everything I can about that area of communication. You have no idea how many technical spec sheets I’ve read over the past week. -__-

Mind you, this is way out of my wheelhouse, so take everything with a grain of salt here:

Above: That’s what the wave looks like while the blade is on. The ending is slightly unique to each color. Spork used a logic analyzer to get the data into Pulseview.

After trying to read the data line with an Arduino, and then reading 100 wiki articles, I think it’s using some kind of UART serial protocol. Maybe some flavor of NRZ with a weird baud rate.

The UART and OOK decoding in the above screenshot are just the programs default versions of the protocol, and not entirely accurate.

Now here’s where things get crazy: I google today to see if there’s any suppliers or “4 pin LED pcb toy” boards, since it seems really unusual of a product component. I found one: It’s of similar design to the DAK Rivers of Light wand released two years ago!

Long story short: I think the sabers are using the same LED library as the Magic Your Way/Glow With the Show products.

Since Pulseview’s decoding is funky, I noted all the waves into binary by hand, then inverted the bits and converted them to hex. They seem to match the general protocol of GWTS, but not sure yet until it can be tested tomorrow.

So... TLDR; there’s a very slight chance we can send new commands/colors/animation to the blade if it’s really sharing the same codebase with GWTS.

VERY SLIGHT CHANCE, but still an interesting lead. 

Some GWTS Protocol Reference Links:

Main Commands: http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/showthread.php?25142-Glow-with-*OUR*-Show-and-MSP430G2553-discussion&p=377990#post377990

Colors: http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/showthread.php?25142-Glow-with-*OUR*-Show-and-MSP430G2553-discussion&p=259750#post259750