Animated GIF crashes smartmatrix 3.0

[tcottle]

I have been experimenting with animated GIFs on a 64 x 64 panel. Everything is working fine except for the attachment. It crashes the display. I am using the stock example with the following changes

kMatrixWidth = 64
kMatrixHeight = 64
kRefreshDepth = 24
kDmaBufferRows = 2
kMatrixOptions = (SMARTMATRIX_OPTIONS_BOTTOM_TO_TOP_STACKING);
matrix.setRefreshRate(60);

Thanks!

[embedded-creations]

I'll take a look to see if I can reproduce the crash here, and if so, try to trace it down.

One thought though, if looks like the GIF is going to all white briefly, which would cause a surge of current going to the displays during the white frame. If your power supply or wiring or any other part of the power circuit isn't able to handle that and the voltage going to the Teensy drops, that could be the source of the crash. Try lowering the brightness and see if your crash goes away.

[tcottle]

Thanks - I wondered if it could be a P/S problem. I reset the current
limit to 80W and the problem still persisted. I am out on travel for a
week but will adjust the brightness down and report back on the results

Can you recommend a tool that breaks down an animated GIF into its
component frames?

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 7:12 PM, Louis Beaudoin notifications@github.com
wrote:

I'll take a look to see if I can reproduce the crash here, and if so, try
to trace it down.

One thought though, if looks like the GIF is going to all white briefly,
which would cause a surge of current going to the displays during the white
frame. If your power supply or wiring or any other part of the power
circuit isn't able to handle that and the voltage going to the Teensy
drops, that could be the source of the crash. Try lowering the brightness
and see if your crash goes away.

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#7 (comment)

[embedded-creations]

There's a couple here in this article I wrote for the Adafruit Learning System:
https://learn.adafruit.com/smartmatrix-animated-gif-player/gifs

GIMP and ezgif.com should work.

[embedded-creations]

I'm able to reproduce the crash, but haven't yet been able to track down the bug. I ran the GIF through ezgif trying a 0-pixel crop first, and color reduction next, to try to keep the GIF content the same but reencode it, and still get crashes. I opened the file in GIMP, then exported as GIF animation, and that crashes as well.

I'm planning to track this down and fix it in the next minor release (excluding today's Arduino 1.6.8 fix release), sorry about this issue.

[tcottle]

Thanks! It was on my to-do list for today to extract out all of the
frames and display it one at a time ...

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Louis Beaudoin notifications@github.com
wrote:

I'm able to reproduce the crash, but haven't yet been able to track down
the bug. I ran the GIF through ezgif trying a 0-pixel crop first, and color
reduction next, to try to keep the GIF content the same but reencode it,
and still get crashes. I opened the file in GIMP, then exported as GIF
animation, and that crashes as well.

I'm planning to track this down and fix it in the next minor release
(excluding today's Arduino 1.6.8 fix release), sorry about this issue.

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#7 (comment)

[embedded-creations]

This is a weird GIF, it does things I didn't know were allowed by the GIF spec:

I saw some weird things when parsing through the file, including an X,Y coordinate that was outside of the 64x64 bounds. I opened the file in GIMP, then chose "Fit Canvas to Layers", and this weird stuff showed up outside of the 64x64 bounds.

A longterm solution is probably to throw out any pixels that are outside the bounds of the GIF decoder's buffer. I'm considering a rewrite of the GIF decoder, and I'll keep this feature in mind. A shortterm solution is to edit the GIF file manually to remove the extra stuff outside the bounds.

You can use ezgif's resize tool, but only one option works: Imagemagick + coalesce. The other two options either leave the graphics outside the bounds, or resizes the GIF to make the graphics out of bounds visible.

http://ezgif.com/resize/

Here's a version that doesn't crash the sketch:

[embedded-creations]

I added bounds checking in a couple places, and now even this weird GIF plays without crashing.