Visual Segment Designer v2.00 - "See" your settings before you upload

[MarkT]

ADMIN NOTE:
See latest posts for most recent version.

Procyon AVS Users:

I've developed an Excel 2007 based tool to assist in the intelligent design of the visual segments of the Procyon AVS. I have not tested it with earlier or later versions of Excel, but it will likely work on later versions. It has taken me almost 2 months and well over 100 hours of sometimes very frustrating coding time ..... but IMHO the end-result is well worth it. I won't go into the gory details in this initial posting; but, if you have any questions about the code or mathematics used, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail or reply to this thread.

In order to run this Excel tool, you must enable macros by doing the following:

1. Go to Office Button, then Excel Options
2. Check Show Developer tab in the Ribbon, then click OK
3. Click the Developer tab, then Macro Security which opens the Trust Center
4. Click Macro Settings on the left
5. Click the Enable all macros.... radio button, then click OK

Here are the key features of this tool:

• Duplicates the Procyon Editor's settings
• Allows individual color channels to be turned on or off
• Allows selection of sine, triangle or square wave for color channel waveforms
• Generates waveforms, including changes in frequency, amplitude, dc offset, duty cycle (square wave only), phase and sweeptime (limited to 10s)
• Generates a 256 level color gradient, based on the resultant combination of one or more of the color channels
• Color gradient can be enabled or disabled

Please, let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to make a general comment about the tool.

Enjoy,

Mark Turney
Ocala, FL
mdt9111@yahoo.com

[MarkT]

After looking again at the Procyon Editor settings, I realized that it starts up with the Square waveform as the default, and also that the order of the wave table dropdown box is: Sine, Square, & then Triangular.

My tool settings were slightly different; therefore, I changed it and believe it now matches the Procyon Editor exactly. The newest version of the tool is attached.

Additionally, I have attached some screen shots, in the event anyone doesn't yet have Excel 2007 or later, but wants to see what to expect from the tool.

Once again, enjoy!
MT

[synaesthesia]

Wow...

[MarkT]

Thanks for the kind reply synaesthesia.

I didn't expect this to take as long as it did (isn't that always the case ). During the development work, I have only been using the Procyon's factory sessions. Now that the tool is functional, I will be getting back to continued learning about brain waves, entrainment, AVS & it's applications .... with the goal of creating useful sessions.

Please, utilize the tool and let me know if you find any issues. If there is a future demand, I would consider developing a free-standing application. In the meantime, please let others know about this tool .... it is as a whole is free to use and redistribute (with the caveat that the code is copyrighted and should not be utilized for commercial use without my permission ).

Thanks again,
MT

[Robert Austin]

Hi, Mark--

I'll second Synaesthesia's "Wow!" You've clearly put a great deal of work into this project, and thanks for sharing it with our community. The color-mix bar at the bottom is very interesting, and we clearly need to manufacture eyes-open (ganzfeld) eyewear to fully take advantage of this tool (though you can simulate this in part by cutting out little paper ovals which are sized to slip into the top and bottom of the Procyon ganzframes, slightly curved over the LED cover. In a darkened room, this works surprisingly well). I've also tested this under Office 2003, with similar security setting, but it simply generated a stack of VB error windows. Works fine, so far, under 2007.

All the best,
Robert

[MarkT]

Hi Robert,

Thank you for the feedback - it's nice to hear another positive response to the tool. Over the past couple of months, I've given a lot of thought to the eyes-open vs eyes-closed response to the colored LED's, and the resultant perceived colors. One thing that immediately comes to mind is the fact that we have blood flow in our eye lids, and I'm assuming this shifts the hue slightly toward red (like shining a flashlight through your hand) .... please, correct me if I'm wrong. If you have any quantitative data regarding a shift in hue, I would be happy to incorporate it into the tool to account for that shift when eyes are shut (like they are supposed to be ).

Regarding the Excel version, I had a feeling the VBA code would not be fully compatible with earlier versions. One bit of coding difference that immediately comes to mind is the way colors are generated in Excel 2003 vs 2007. Excel 2003 uses color 'indexes' if I recall correctly. In Excel 2007, colors are created in a way that fits the RGB model perfectly (R(0-255), G(0-255), B(0-255)).

One area of the tool that I would appreciate specific feedback on is the DC Offset. Does my implementation of this look correct?

Thanks again and Best Regards,
Mark Turney

[Andy]

Well done, Mark!

As a programmer I can appreciate what sort of effort it must take to build something like this. Very cool to use Excel which saves doing a lot of the heavy lifting in creating the graphics. Writing this in VB or some other language I would think would be a massive undertaking to create those graphics.

Very impressive. Thank you as well for sharing this with the community; it definitely deserves a sticky!

[MarkT]

Andy,

Thanks for the kind words and for making this thread a sticky. I'm glad the tool is being so well received. I give neuroasis credit for originally turning me on to the idea of using Excel as a platform, as he had begun a similar project a while back. In my professional life, I have a fairly extensive background in using VBA with Microsoft Excel and Access, so it made sense to leverage that knowledge for this personal project.

I think many folks will conceptualize AVS better via pictures than they can with a table full of numbers or even a graphed waveform. That was my reason for developing the gradient .... show someone what they will see across a time period. Then, those numbers can simply be plugged into the Procyon Editor. I see it as mapping the qualitative (color gradient) to the quantitative (Procyon Editor settings) and then back to the qualitative (LED output and resultant perceived colors).

Looking forward to more commentary and feedback,
Mark

[neuroasis]

Hey MarkT,
Thanks so much for working on this! You have made a valuable contribution to development for the Procyon. It looks very impressive. I'll test it out more and report what I find.

Scott

[MarkT]

Hey Scott,

It's good to hear from you again, and I'm glad you are going to try out the tool. Please, do let me know what you think after some testing. There were certainly some challenges in development (especially the duty cycle) as well as some overall limitations by using Excel. But, all-in-all, the advantages of using Excel far outweighed the disadvantages ... not the least of which would be that I would probably only be 10% done by now if I had tried to code this as a free-standing app .

I'm currently working on some additions to the tool - dropdown boxes for frequency and color ranges that will automatically populate the fields ... a sort of starting place for AVS noobs like me. And, a reverse button that will flip the start and stop fields, as happens in the Procyon Editor when you add a new segment (F3).

Take care.
Mark