Week 8 Progress

1. Finish p5 progression (5 minutes, colors incorporated)
2. Refine Neopixel colors for environments and try to make more dynamic
3. Finish pedestal
4. Finish integrating all audio, visual and serial components
5. Timeline and blueprints for making everything modular

Finish p5 Progression

This week, we extended our p5 visualization to be a full 5 minutes with the 5 color schemes! Also, once the animation finishes its 5 minute sequence, it fades to the background color and starts again. This indicates to the user that it is over, but if they want to stay in the room they can continue to enjoy visuals. Here is the link to the most recent iteration. One thing we want to refine a little bit as we move forward is the transition from the 4th to 5th minute because it is a little abrupt. We also need to get the flow field to run again after the first loop, which will just mean we have to declare instances of our Particle objects in a more dynamic way. Another interesting thing, as the animation loops through, we think a translate() statement is unintentionally affecting our canvas somewhere, because the visuals look slightly different the second and third times around than they did the first time. Still neat visuals, but something to perhaps debug in the future.

Refine Neopixels & Add Dynamic Components

One of the biggest goals for this week was making the Neopixels more dynamic by adding in more interesting visual effects. We wanted to add in a “twinkling effect” to one of our Neopixel strips that would hold a different color palette for each of the “environments”.

We used a lot of logic from this code example by Mark Kriegsman that featured the ability to choose from different color palettes and transition between them. It took some time to adapt his helper functions into our code, but his documentation was great so the process was relatively painless.

Once we got the twinkle effect working with the rest of our code, we experimented with different palettes for each of the environments and tweaked things until we were happy with the final effect. We may still refine the transitions in the coming weeks, but for now we can move on. Check out the effect in our demo video at the end of this post!

Finish Pedestal

This week, we finished up the pedestal up that will hold the phone slot! It will sit near the entrance to the room, and will be the first thing the user interacts with. Our classmate and close friend Sara is a woodworking expert and was very helpful in this process!

First we cut four large pieces of scrap wood for the sides of the pedestal using a table saw. Then, we used a nail gun to attach these little right angle blocks to the wood pieces to help us be more precise when nailing the pedestal walls to each other.

This is what the inside of the structure looked like when all four walls were attached!

Then we used a palm sander to smooth out some unevenness along the corners.

To make it even smoother and more precise, we filled in any other cracks, holes, or irregularities with drywall mud.

This helped the pedestal transform from looking like several pieces of wood put together into a unified form. Which is good since we are prioritizing aesthetics in our final Flow Room.

After that we sanded off any excess drywall.

The last step was painting!

We still may do a few touch ups, but overall are very satisfied with our pedestal.

Finish Integrating all Audio, Visual and Serial Components

After Elsa worked hard on developing the p5 sketches into a continuous 5-minute visual progression, it was time to integrate those with the p5 sketch that handles the serial events and audio triggers.

Since the last p5 visualization and the new one both use “color modes” to easily change the colors of the visualization in real-time, this process mostly included adding some helper functions for the more complex visualizations and updating the integers for each color mode. One way to take this further in future weeks is to add in a smoother transition between the color modes, and to figure out a way to restart the visualization when a new user has come into the room.

Check out the video below to see the twinkling Neopixels and more complex visualizations at work!

Timeline and Blueprints for Modularity

This week, we thought we would have to come up with a robust plan for making our project modular, in case we had to move it between rooms for our final documentation and expo. But – on Tuesday, we got huge news! We had officially been approved for building our project in a room in the ATLAS building. This means that going forward, we can focus on the effects and aesthetics of the user experience instead of packaging everything up for portability and modularity. We are so excited! Thank you to our instructor Sheiva and ATLAS’s Chief of Operations Stephanie!