Velas, glowing.

I need to add a layer behind the screen to diffuse the LEDs, but the glowing looks amazing in a darkened room.

This is a short summary presentation I made to accompany my final project for PComp and ICM. Please download the PowerPoint file in order to view this presentation as it is intended. Unfortunately, SlideShare does not support slide animations, and it has some problems with formatting.

I will upload images and code in the next few days.

A few links to keep in mind…

Breathing Earth

Worldometers

… every second

Running the Numbers (photography by Chris Jordan)

I’m trying to create an applet that accrues a pile of shapes over time to visualize data that gets expressed along the lines of “over a given amount of time such-and-such happens.” For example, every five seconds a child dies of preventable or curable poverty-related causes, or every 30 seconds someone dies of malaria, etc. I would eventually like to have different flows of circles according to user input so that you could choose to compare accruals of different bits of data (e.g. you could see the rate of poverty-related child mortality at the same time as the rate of pounds of beef consumed in the U.S.) Right now I’m having trouble splitting up the array of balls so that they drop at a specified rate. Once that is sorted out I need to work on their behavior when they collide at the bottom of the screen.

I hooked up a photocell and an LED, based on the Analog In Lab. The LED was glowing, but it wasn’t reacting to the changes in light the photocell was sending to the serial port. I hooked up a potentiometer just to trouble shoot, and the LED dimmed and grew lighter appropriately. So, there’s a problem with the numbers coming in via the photocell. The pot is sending values from 0 to 1023, but the photocell is sending values in the range of 20-60. I multiplied the photocell values by 20, which affected the LED well enough for my purposes, since I won’t be using the LED as the final output.

I hooked up the thermistor and switched the photocell values back to being divided by 4 so that its value falls below 255. The values coming through the serial monitor for both the thermistor and the photocell look good, so I’m ready for the next phase of the project: setting up the information to work with Processing…

After a few minor hurdles and some help from Dan Shiffmann I got my code working. The Arduino code looks like this:
/*
Sensor Reader
Language: Wiring/Arduino

Reads two analog inputs
and outputs their values.
Connections:
analog sensors on analog input pins 0 and 1
*/

int analogOne = 0;       // analog input– thermistor
int analogTwo = 1;       // analog input– photo cell
int analogThree = 2;     // analog input– flex

int sensorValue = 0;     // reading from the sensor

void setup() {
// configure the serial connection:
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
// read the sensor:
sensorValue = analogRead(analogOne);
// print the results:
Serial.print(sensorValue, DEC);
Serial.print(“,”);

// read the sensor:
sensorValue = analogRead(analogTwo);
// print the results:
Serial.print(sensorValue, DEC);
Serial.print(“,”);

// read the sensor:
sensorValue = analogRead(analogThree);
// print the results:
Serial.println(sensorValue, DEC);
}

And the Processing code looks like this:

import processing.serial.*;

Serial myPort;
Orb myOrb;
int r = 0;
int g = 125;
int b = 0;
int a = 0;
float bgcolor = 0;

void setup() {
size(1300,800);
smooth();
// List all the available serial ports
println(Serial.list());
// I know that the first port in the serial list on my mac
// is always my  Arduino module, so I open Serial.list()[0].
// Change the 0 to the appropriate number of the serial port
// that your microcontroller is attached to.
myPort = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[0], 9600);
// read bytes into a buffer until you get a linefeed (ASCII 10):
myPort.bufferUntil(‘n’);
myOrb = new Orb (color(r,g,b,a));
}

void draw() {
background(bgcolor);
myOrb.setColor(color(r,g,b,a));
myOrb.display();
}

// serialEvent  method is run automatically by the Processing applet
// whenever the buffer reaches the  byte value set in the bufferUntil()
// method in the setup():

void serialEvent(Serial myPort) {
// read the serial buffer:
String myString = myPort.readStringUntil(‘n’);
// if you got any bytes other than the linefeed:
if (myString != null) {
myString = trim(myString);
// split the string at the commas
// and convert the sections into integers:
int sensors[] = int(split(myString, ‘,’));
// print out the values you got:
for (int sensorNum = 0; sensorNum < sensors.length; sensorNum++) {
print(“Sensor ” + sensorNum + “: ” + sensors[sensorNum] + “t”);
}

// add a linefeed after all the sensor values are printed:
println();

if (sensors.length > 1) {
r = sensors[0];
b = sensors[1];
a = sensors[2];
}

}
}

With the Orb class written separately as this:

class Orb {
color c;
float orbXPos = width/2;
float orbYPos = height/2;
float orbWidth = height;
float orbHeight = height;

Orb(color tempC){
c = tempC;
}

void display() {
noStroke();
fill(c);
ellipse(orbXPos, orbYPos, orbWidth, orbHeight);
}

void setColor(color tempC) {
c= tempC;
}
}