At first glance, converting the Nyan Cat animated GIF to a run length encoded image doesn’t make a lot of sense: I’d need to decode the GIF at some point anyway, why go through the effort?

The key point is that the conversion process can be done on a desktop PC, with far more powerful and user-friendly tools. Yes, I could have done the work to port a GIF library to the PIC32 chip running the Hackaday Superconference 2018 badge, but on a desktop computer I could fire up Python, “from PIL import Image“, and be off and running manipulating a decoded GIF image sequence.

Once I got over the (small) hump of initial learning, it was easy to write a Python script to do everything I wanted to do to the image:

1. Downscale from original 400×400 resolution to 320×320
2. Crop off the top and bottom to obtain a 320×240 image
3. Perform run-length encoding of resulting image.
4. Output encoded bytes.

In step 4, the output comes in the form of text: specifically, C source code. Each encoded image is a static C array declaration that I could copy and paste into MPLAB X for storage into PIC32 program memory.

I had hoped the simple GIF would compress well with run length encoding, and the first results were quite promising: a little over 2 kilobytes for the first frame, and there are 12 frames in total implying the neighborhood of 24-28 kilobytes.

The original Nyan Cat GIF takes up 30 kilobytes. Granted, it is higher resolution and different aspect ratio, but this is going to make the PIC32 side programming far FAR easier. Which not only makes it easier for me to write, but also for others to read and understand in a little demo. I’m willing to trade a bit of space for those benefits.

(The Python script used for Nyan Cat encoding lives in this minimal Github repository.)

(Cross-posted to NewScrewdriver.com)