The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a high energy neutrino and cosmic ray detector located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Its main components – IceCube and DeepCore in the deep-ice, and IceTop at the glacier's surface – consist of thousands of Digital Optical Modules or DOMs that detect Cherenkov light emitted by particles travelling through the ice. To be able to represent the information about the captured light, a number of LED displays have been developed over time. These displays use an (RGB) LED to represent a single DOM or a cluster of DOMs. Detection time is usually mapped to color, and the amount of light detected is mapped to brightness. This documentation accompanies the firmware that was originally written to drive the displays built at Ghent University, and serves to provide details on how to implement new displays in the same framework.

Display electronics and firmware

To simplify the LED driving, the displays use RGB LED packages that include a driver and serial communications such as the WS2812B or APA102. These are then driven in turn by a microcontroller that also sports a USB port to provide connectivity to a PC. By allowing the PC to send frames of raw RGB LED data, these displays are essentially a generic video display, albeit one arranged in a rather odd layout that matches the IceCube detector.

To start designing your own display (firmware), the following resources can be usefull:

Check the list of implementations to see if anything already exists that fits your needs, or can be adapted to do so.
Otherwise, read the guidelines for new implementation.

USB connectivity and steamshovel

The device's USB port can be used to transfer display data from a USB host. A detailed overiew can be found in the firmware documentation. A Steamshovel artist has been implemented using this connectivity to be able to display any simulation or data file.

The options of the LedDisplay artist have been modelled after the Bubbles artist:

Device: select one of the detected LED displays. Detection happens once at start-up.
Static color and brightness: Select a color and brightness for static DOM maps.
Compression: Exponent of the power law used to compress hit info. Since a linear scale would hide the details in low charges, the high charges are compressed, giving the display a larger dynamic range. Note that display gamma correction is performed independently of this setting.
Colormap: time to color mapping.
Finite pulses: If 'Use infinite pulses' is checked, a hit will be shown starting from its time of detection. Otherwise it will disappear after the selected duration. This is different from the Bubbles setting in that the highest value of the pulse duration slider isn't interpreted as positive infinity, but just \(10^5\)ns.

Steamshovel with LedDisplay artist