Out of my many vices, I think planning-my-life-around-concerts is a relatively minor one — as long as one overlooks the fact that I was extremely close to attending another university simply because O-Week overlapped with an Ed Sheeran concert in California that I had already bought tickets for a year earlier. 

I’m here, though. 

I chose Rice, applied for SEED, came to Houston for the summer, and as a result of all this, I ended up at a Jon Bellion concert Saturday night. Hands down, one of the best performances I’ve ever witnessed. There’s this pure, unadulterated joy that exudes from Jon Bellion when he creates music on stage: ad-libbing a bass line and beat for his band to follow, exchanging riffs with the opening act singers, dancing through the stage lights that cast his silhouette into the crowd.

I think I experienced my own small version of Jon Bellion’s joy of creation this week. Instead of writing melodies, however, I composed code, and instead of blinding stage lights, I have flashing LED strips. 

After spending Monday and Tuesday utterly devoted to developing and perfecting our mid-summer presentation, Ring the Decibels buckled down to fix the previous team’s prototype because, unfortunately, sometimes good things fall apart — like this prototype somehow did. At first, the whole mess of wires and components left by the previous team was quite overwhelming, especially because their circuit diagram wasn’t actually ever correct. We decided to start from the ground up, using the spare parts to assemble a new circuit, component by component. By the end of Tuesday, we had three of four parts hooked up and functioning properly. More importantly, though, we knew exactly how to do everything ourselves now.

Wednesday morning, we started with the final component left: the RGB LED strip.  We passed the first couple hours of our day scouring the internet for a tutorial that could get an independent LED strip running. Finally, something worked — well, sort of worked. The LED strip only showed very faint red lights when it was supposed to cycle through colors. But Clement had a theory: maybe the LEDs required more power than the Arduino connected to a computer could offer. We disconnected the Arduino, plugged the device into the wall, tried one more time — and it worked! Finally!

Now we had just had to integrate the LED strip with the other three components. At first, we thought this would be complicated, but it actually turned to be quite simple & sweet — we removed all the wiring for the LEDs on our previous integrated circuit, attached the wiring from the independent LED circuit, and uploaded the original code — suddenly, I started to run wild with excitement as we had reached the furthest point of the previous team and were poised to start making our own changes.

So let’s begin. 

We divided into two teams: Dylan and Clement would work on creating a correct circuit diagram for our now functioning prototype and then move onto learning how to control another RGB LED strip to output interesting light patterns while Wilson and I would start figuring out how to code and implement an algorithm that averaged our analog data inputs from the microphone over a period of time. Wilson and I found a data-smoothing example code and after some finessing and help from Grant, we were able to apply it to our design problem. We then worked towards having different ranges of averages trigger a different color on a single RGB LED. At first we thought something was wrong with the circuit or code because the LED we were using never showed blu light as it was supposed to, but once we discovered that the LED was burnt out and we replaced it, everything worked as intended.

Throughout all this progress, everyone on Ring the Decibels was too pre-occupied to keep track of the time; before I realized, it was time to pack up and head home to get ready for our SEED trip to watch Houston Dynamo play at BBVA. The game was thrilling and the hot dogs were wonderfully cheap. Overall, the night was exceptional and invigorating. I am only human, though, and by the time I got home, I was exhausted so I crashed into my bed as soon as I could, which was unfortunately before finishing this blog post.

I woke up to a celebratory morning in America — July 4, the 243rd anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I’ve decided to use this long holiday weekend as a little reset on LIFE, so I used my morning to slowly dig my way out of the stupid deep list of chores I’ve been avoiding. Later, I learned some new guitar-playing techniques from my friend and made dinner with my fellowship. And, of course, after eating, we piled into our SUVs and drove straight to Hermann Park. We played games on the lawn until it was finally time to turn our eyes to the sky as the fireworks burst into stars above us. 

And now here I am, finishing this blog post at 2am on Friday morning. If you would like to know why I consistently go to sleep later than I should, don’t ask cuz I don’t know either. Maybe procrastination is a major vice I should be focusing on. Maybe, IDK, and I somewhat don’t care as long as I can keep going to concerts.