arduino-quake-flicker-lamp

A flicker lamp for Arduino with Quake styles.

Context:

Somebody in reddit found the same pattern of the flicker lamp in Half Life and Half Life Alyx in June

And more games use the same patterns, first one is Quake from 1996

So I made a emergency lamp flicker with the same original Quake styles, with some code adaptations. The hardware:

The code:

First I get the original world.qc with the original styles.

For the Arduino version I get the styles and put in a string array:

String  lightstyle[] = {
  "string1", 
  "string2", 
  "strin3",
  ..., 
  "stringN" }

The Quake flicker use the letters a to z to indicate the brightness of the light. Where "a" is for total darkness and "z" for total brightness.

So for make this work with the Arduino and the LEDs, I get the pin 9 of the board (both for Arduino Uno or Arduino Mini Pro) and use the analogWrite() to control the brightness. This require a conversion from "a" to "z" from the original code to 0-255 for the analogWrite() function. This is made whit this simple code, in the Arduino loop():

  for (i = 0; i < l; i++)
  {
    value = (lightstyle[LIGHT_STYLE][i]) - 'a'; //Get the value from a to z from the string array minus 'a' (ASCII 0x61). This returns a value from 0 to 25.
    value = map(value, 0, 25, 0, 255);    // convert from 0-25 to 0-255
    analogWrite(BLED, value);     // Put the value in the pin 9 (PWM)
    delay(FTIME);       // Wait the time for one step
  }

The FTIME value of 100 ms I get with a video of Quake gameplay and a vídeo editor app (Vegas Pro) and pen and paper.

I tested with the classical "FLUORESCENT FLICKER" (10 - "mmamammmmammamamaaamammma"). For change the style, change the LIGHT_STYLE define value.

For power supply I use a USB cable for the arduino and a power bank.

Vídeo demo:

Schematics for one LED:

Schematics for 30 LED: