Your bin's screen plays little shows between its name and its readings: the ten worm screens, and anything your team makes. A picture is one drawing; a video is a stack of drawings played fast, like a flip book. You draw it, this page turns it into a show file, and you put that file on the bin.
Open Piskel (it opens in a new tab; keep this page open too). It's Piskel, a free pixel editor, kept on our own site and already set to the bin's screen: 128 dots wide, 64 tall, 10 frames a second. Nothing to install, no account.
The size is at the bottom of the editor. If it isn't 128x64 (Piskel remembers your last drawing), open Resize on the right (the icon with the arrows), untick Maintain aspect ratio, type 128 and 64, and click Resize. Smaller works too (it gets centred on the screen); bigger gets shrunk to fit.
Whatever you draw lights up; whatever you leave see-through stays dark. Use the pen, the line and rectangle tools, and a pen size of 2 or more for anything that should stand out. Text: the screen's own letters are 8 dots tall, so any letters smaller than that will be hard to read.
The frames are down the left side. Click Add new frame (or the copy icon on a frame to start from the one before) and change your drawing a little each time. The FPS slider at the top right is how many frames play each second: 5 to 10 looks good on the bin, and it can go up to 20. A video can have up to 100 frames.
Come back to this page and click Get my drawing from Piskel below: every frame and the speed come straight across. (Using a different Piskel, or a picture from somewhere else? Export it as a PNG for a picture or a GIF for a video, and pick that file below instead. A photo or a logo works too: the converter shrinks it and turns it black and white; check the preview.)
shows.txt. Letters, numbers and dashes only.Same as when you load code: viper-ide.org, then Connect.
shows (once per bin)In the file list on the left, make a new folder at the top level of the board and name it
exactly shows, all lowercase.
.pbm file into that folderUse the file list's upload button and pick the file you downloaded above, so it ends up as
shows/my-show.pbm.
Press Ctrl+D in Viper's terminal, or unplug it and plug it back in. The bin looks for shows when it starts. If a file is broken, the terminal says which one and why, and the bin just skips it.
With no list, the bin plays the ten worm screens and then every file in shows,
A to Z. To choose, make a file called shows.txt at the top level of the board
(next to main.py, not inside the folder) with one show per line, in the order you
want. Lines starting with # are notes for people; the bin ignores them.
# our team's shows my-show Wormhole dancing-worm Worm Party
That plays your show, then the Wormhole worm screen, then your dancing worm, then Worm Party,
and round again. Upper or lower case and spaces don't matter, and .pbm on the end is
optional. A name the bin can't find is skipped (and named in the terminal). To show only your
own, list only your own. The worm screens are called:
| Big Worm | Worm Party | Wormhole | Underground | Worm Pulse |
| Compost | Hello Worm | Worm Lab | Conga | Worm Radar |
Restart the bin after changing shows.txt.
A show file is a PBM ("portable bitmap"), one of the oldest and simplest picture formats there is, so you could even make one with code. One frame is a few words of text and then the dots, 8 to a byte, left to right, top row first, 1 for lit:
P4 # fps 10 <- optional, first frame only: video speed (1 to 20) # hold 4000 <- optional, first frame only: how long the last frame stays (ms) 128 64 <- width and height, at most 128 and 64 ...1024 bytes of dots...
A video is just frames one after another in the same file, each starting with P4
and its size. Without notes, a video plays 10 frames a second and a picture stays up 4 seconds.
Each full-screen frame is 1 KB, so a 100-frame video is 100 KB; keep a team's whole
shows folder under about 500 KB so the bin keeps room for its readings.