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Found Some Bugs During Supercon

A project log for Nyan Cat Badge Demo (2018 Supercon)

An adaptation of YouTube star Nyan Cat for the 2018 Hackaday Superconference Badge

rogerRoger 11/13/2018 at 00:220 Comments

I had a great time at 2018 Hackaday Superconference and I think Nyan Cat was a success as part of the conference badge. I’m happy with it, even though I found two minor problems with my Nyan Cat app during the weekend.

The first problem was that it does not tell the badge it is running, which is required to prevent automatic power-down. The auto-sleep feature was added after my code was merged into master, shortly before the badges started getting flashed en masse. I knew this power saving feature was going in but I was busy with badge production. So I didn’t have the chance to add code to keep the badge from going to sleep while Nyan Cat is running. My life was filled with rows and rows of badges.

What this means is that Nyan Cat couldn’t just keep running on a badge forever. The badge will go to sleep and need to be awakened for animation to resume.

Somewhat related to the above, there’s a problem with timer synchronization upon wake. It appears that when the badge is asleep, the main timer still advances at some rate. I believe this is a side effect of loop_badge() in badge.c. Called by timer #5 every 15 milliseconds to check the status of the power button. During this check, the main system timer (running on timer #1) clicks upwards even though the rest of the badge is asleep.

What this means is that, if the badge is running Nyan Cat when it goes into low power mode, the timer will advance even though the animation & music does not. As a result, when the badge wakes up, the loops in charge of animation and timing will frantically try to catch up. It only takes a second or two to get back in sync, but in that brief moment we get a comically distorted kitty running and singing at warp speed.

This second problem can be reproduced by: 

  1. Launch Nyan Cat with 'nya' to see and hear dancing singing pop tart cat.
  2. Push the power button to put the badge in low power mode. 
  3. Wait about 30 seconds.
  4. Push the button again to wake up the badge. 
  5. See and hear cat in hyperdrive for a few seconds before slowing down to normal speed.

I might go back and fix these bugs in the future, but they’re not horrendous embarrassments (and Nyan Cat in hyperdrive is pretty hilarious) so I’m content to leave them as-is for now.

(Cross-posted to NewScrewdriver.com)

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