In our final project of the quarter we are tasked with making something using Arduino. I must admit that prior to this class I had a grand total of one day of experience with Arduino and physical computing in general. That being said, after exploring some of the projects online I see a great amount of potential for this discipline in my artistic endeavors. My first thought was to create some type of wearable device since I had these really cool (cheap) sunglasses that I wanted to incorporate! I dug through some of the examples for the Circuit Playground Express as well as some projects online for inspiration. I decided to move forward with a basic audio visualizer but much to my dismay I discovered that the mic on my board was not working (or at least I couldn’t get it to work even when I loaded the example sketch. After attempting a few different fixes I searched for online with no luck I decided to pivot and move forward creating something else.
On Thursday I had an additional Arduino workshop and I really pushed for practice in using an Arduino to interact with Processing. I had some basic success in the workshop so I decided to apply that to my project for the Tools class. Now, I had to decide what I wanted to do! My first thought was to use some of the capacitive touch sensors on the board to interact with a circle and change its shape, color, etc.. However there wasn’t much visual aesthetic in this so I decided to work in some of the earlier projects we did in class. I eventually landed on a sort of pong variation. I knew that using the edge constraints on a circle in processing couple with some speed and direction can create some cool effects. That being said I got to work figuring out how to transfer data from the Arduino into processing via Serial.
My first test was to use the touch sensor to change the size of a rectangle. Much to my delight it worked on the first try! I was able to increase the width of the box while pressing A1 on the board and then it would shrink again if I took my finger off the sensor. Very cool š
Ok, so with this success and the idea for a final project in mind I moved on to the next step. Figuring out how I wanted to move the ball on the screen with the Arduino. Since the ball has a x and y speed variable to control its movement I figured I could increase or decrease that. It took me a few tries to get it right but I was able to achieve an aesthetic that I was happy with. Sometimes the speed gets a little bit out of control so I figured I could make a reset button using the Arduino as well. I was right! I used one of the buttons to set the x and y speeds back to their original values as to prolong the interactivity of the program. With these successes in mind I wanted to explore more of the possibilities that lay in front of me. I added to other functionalities that I’m very happy with. The other button redraws the background so the user can start over with a clean canvas and a speed of their liking. Also, the switch controls two sets of color values that can be drawn with. Overall for my first Arduino / Processing project I’m extremely happy. Can’t wait to show it off in class š