Physical Computing 10.10

Serial Communication Labs

This week I worked on the labs with Martin and Nick. This was a much better way to work because we were able to bounce ideas off of each other and really try to fully grasp the concepts in a way that doesn’t happen as effectively when we work alone. A few highlights from this session is that we were able to use the inData property to control the color of our canvas (as seen below):

Using data from a potentiometer to control the background color of a p5 sketch

We also got the graph to work with the potentiometer as well. Overall these labs were super helpful in understanding how to get Arduino to interact with p5 and gave us some good ideas on how to approach our midterm.

using a potentiometer reading to generate a p5 graph

Project Ideas

Based on a current p5 sketch that I’m working on (link here) Martin and I were thinking about create a little Halloween-themed video game. We may use the “keep the pace” mechanic that I almost have done in the referenced sketch, we may do something slightly different. If we’re looking to stick with this idea, we’re thinking that we’d want to create a controller that consists of a potentiometer to control the speed of the character, and a button to potentially incorporate a jump function. We are in the process of determining win/lose conditions as well as penalties or bonuses for in-game actions. I feel like I’d be leaning pretty heavily on Martin for the p-comp stuff as I don’t feel too confident on that side.