Displaying holiday decorations that use lights is a family tradition.
Making them from bright and blinking lights was my addition.
The first version, Mr. Blinky, controlled AC power from an Arduino Due mesa, connected to an 8-channel industrial-scale and industrial-cost AC switching device. There was very little in the way of software controlling the lights.
There were questions created by this simple implementation:
what does this mean: “the beat”, or, “beats per minute”?
can I describe the music of a song in beats per minute?
why do lights with filaments (from the 1900s) go from dark to light or light to dark more slowly than lights with LEDs (from the 2000s)?
how does a sequence of on/off/on/off cause an image that moves?
None of the questions had anything to do with the electronics of the Arduino board or the AC switching devices, so the answers were elsewhere, in software.
SimpleSal is the end result of the development of answers and solutions in software simple enough to allow novices and apprentices to become skilled.
