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1Board on the jig
Set the UPDI Friend switch to 3V before the pogo pin touches the board. Never 5V on Pulse: its UPDI pad feeds the mic's 3.3 V rail.
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2Programmer
Plug the UPDI Friend into the computer, then choose its port. After that it connects by itself whenever it is plugged in.
Speed
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3Check the board
Board powered from its USB plug, pogo pin on the UPDI pad.
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4Engine and lighting
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5Drive details
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Erases the chip, writes the engine with its lighting, sets the BOOTEND fuse, then writes the ID card. Everything is read back to check it.
Terminal fallback
If the browser flasher misbehaves, the same job runs from the Mac's Terminal with pymcuprog (install once:
pip3 install pymcuprog).
Flash Station
Plug a sealed drive into the station box and send it new lighting through its USB power. Pulse drives need pulsetest, Core drives coretest 1.3 or later.
1 · Station
Plug the XIAO station box into the computer, then choose its port. After that it connects by itself.
2 · Drive
Picked in the list
3 · Engine and lighting
4 · Send
Link test shows a colour and saves nothing. Keep the drive in the socket until the box says it's done.
This drive's history
| When | Station | What | Engine | Result |
|---|
Drives
Every board you initialise is listed here, with its history.
| Drive | Board | Casing | Engine | Lighting | Initialised | Chip serial |
|---|
Routines
Preview what a drive's lights will do, using the same maths as the firmware. Change a setting and the preview replays straight away.
Today's engine
New player
Plug-in heartbeat
What a drive does on a Flash Station after the white handshake pulse: 12 heartbeats out from the socket, then a flow up and back, every 38.6 s. Top: the plug-in preview. Bottom: the new player.
Plug-in preview
New player
Animation lab
Describe an animation in a Claude Code session, like "on the drop: white fill from the plug up, then red strobes on every beat for 2 bars". Claude writes a recipe and sends a preview clip. Paste the recipe you like here, check it in your colours, then save it to the library's animations folder.
Song moments
A Pulse can recognise a moment in a song from what its mic hears, and play an animation right there, like a white flash on the drop. Add a clip of the song, mark the bars the drive listens for and when the animation plays, check it on the drive, then save it.
Song moments are for Pulse drives: Core has no microphone. Choose Pulse at the top of the tab.
The clip is copied into the library's songs folder. It stays on this computer and is never uploaded.
Click where the animation should start: Play at goes to the nearest beat, and the drive listens to the bars before it. Drag the orange band to listen somewhere else, or the orange line to play later. Play at can't go before "recognised by here". Bar numbers are along the top.
Light cues
Make a song moment's animation on a timeline over the song open in Song moments. Each layer is one effect (a white pulse, a shimmer, a cut out, a Recolour...); layers higher up draw over lower ones. Press Record to play along with the keys, or add a layer and double-click on it to put its effect there. Drag an effect to move it, drag its ends to change its length, and hold Alt (Option on a Mac) as you drag to copy it. Copies are linked: change one and they all change, and the drive plays them for about a byte each.
Light cues are for song moments, so they're for Pulse drives. Choose Pulse at the top of the tab.
Open or add a song in Song moments above first. The timeline starts at its Play at.
While recording: each key adds its effect where you press it, for as long as you hold it. With a layer chosen, every key records into that layer; with none chosen, each key gets a layer of its own. Keys 1–4 pick the LEDs for new effects (all, top, middle, bottom), Z takes out the last one, Esc stops.
Snares
Tune it
Drive profile
Colour sets
Save the colours above under a name, and use them again later. Each set is for one board, so Core shows Core sets and Pulse shows Pulse sets. They are kept in the library folder.
Phase files
A phase file saves the settings for one part of the show: load-up, standard or beat. Saving under a name that exists makes a new version and keeps the old one. A routine (below) picks one file per phase. Colours are not in phase files: use colour sets for those. Recognition has no settings yet.
Routines
A routine picks one phase file for each phase, a colour set and a brightness. Leave a phase on "Engine default" to keep the engine's own look. "Newest" follows new versions of a phase file; pick a version to pin it. Saving under an existing name replaces that routine. Flash Station and Initialise list routines by name.
Screen colours are only a guide: the LEDs' green is much stronger than a monitor's, so judge yellow and orange on the real drive. These settings are not saved or sent yet.
Library
A folder on this computer holding your engines, phase files, routines, animations, song clips and song moments, and the drive register. Nothing in it is uploaded.
Engines
| File | Recognised as | For |
|---|
Where your engine files are
They're in the zips from earlier chats. Copy these into the library's engines folder, or use Add an engine file:
- Pulse:
sota-pulse/out/pulse_1.0_full.hex(bootloader, pulsetest and fuse together; the one for initialising). - Core:
sota-flash-station/station/firmware/sota_leds_v1.2_10mhz.hex(the 10 MHz build the Flash Station needs).
A good place for the folder is Synapto Studio/Lighting/Library. Inside Google Drive or iCloud Drive, it's on every computer you use.
Kept in this browser
Light cues timelines, the Animation lab's recipe and a few choices are kept in this browser, not in the library folder, and only at this web address. To take them to a new address or another computer, save them to a file here and open the file there.