Archive for August 2009

Phidget Servo motor output via Processing

August 12, 2009 Projects 4 comments

I’m currently preparing for a short piece of processing tutoring in the Bachelor of Architecture course, commencing tomorrow.  The course is a 1st year construction subject, in which the year group is designing modular structures from found objects (read; whatever they can find in large amounts at Reverse Garbage), with a  12-15 unsuspecting students are going to be shown the slippery slope that is processing, all in the aim of augmenting small construction projects with responsive elements.I’ve used the standard phidget servo motors with max/msp before, but I’ve decided to switch focus to processing so such solutions will no longer suffice.  There are some benefits to not using max/msp in the university context;

  • Runtime – i can’t count the number of times we’ve built test prototypes and final projects only to see them fall over due to the small number of licences we’ve access to on campus.  The runtime solution is acceptible for last minute, last chance, last straw moments but it’s just not good enough for day to day use or experimentation.
  • The extraordinary cost of licensing – the licences bought by the university come at a ridiculous cost, not to mention the involved installation process.  Processing by comparison is such a simple install – for both the core components and the additional libraries.
  • Extensibility – max/msp additional objects are always a welcome addition to the program, however the objects themselves tend to be closed off, limited in how much they reveal of their inner workings and can be fairly slow.

To this end I’ve enjoyed the processing learning curve, there’s been more than enough learning resources available online and in book form, so I’m definitely pushing for its’ inclusion in the syllabus in the arch. faculty.  Anthony Burke has been teaching processing in the master of architecture course this semester (with assistance from the computation whiz-kid Ben Coorey), so along with the arduino hardware the transition from proprietary to open-source projects is well under way in the DAB.So to proceed with the real agenda of this post, I was searching for simple code to interface with the PhidgetServo motor output units we’ve been using, this time working in processing.  I couldn’t find any decent examples online so had to cobble together one myself.Read on for more;… Read more

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fluid updated

August 12, 2009 Projects 3 comments

I’ve spent a bit more time cleaning up the fluid blobs examples I made last week, this time limiting the Region of Interest and fiddling with the fluid interaction.  Also newly included is a smarter way to interact with the blobs (in the code, i mean), pulling out more precise locational data.  I’ll be looking to mine this one a bit more extensively than I did with the filtration fields installation – and since I seem to be getting better now at things I was attempting before – this should be a lot more fun.In the mix still is some video over network action, as well as potentially a database record of the motion over time.  I’d like to develop this as an interactive (from the visualisation point of view) interface where you could select a day, week or month and view the fluid ripples as they occur, like a fluid time-lapse of the actual motion from the courtyard.  We’ll see.

Fluid Blobs v2 from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

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