The code for Beat Feet is massive, and Eric did  a great job of commenting the whole thing. Below is a zipped file ready for download. Or you can copy and paste the code below, but it won’t have tabs for classes.

Happy foot beating.

ZIP!

beat_feet

The shoes.

They didn’t make themselves, that’s for sure. The documentation for how we made the perfboards for the wireless modules can be found on a flickr photostream here, and the rest of the documentation (code, etc) can be found at our website here.

The show went really well, with just a couple minor set-backs.  My computer kept crashing when I tried to do more than one layer of looping in MIDI. Closing and restarting the Processing sketch seemed to help for a while. Looking back, I really wish we’d found a way to cycle through the preset MIDI files we created, a way to cycle through using a gesture, or the hat somehow. Switching over to the sound sample files from MIDI would have been great… as it was, I had to stop the sketch, change SYNTH to SAMPLE, and then re-run it.

People seemed to enjoy trying to figure out if the floor was sensing my weight, and what exactly the hat was doing. Tom told me not to talk to people at first, but to simply dance, and people would respond or be intrigued by what was happening. After dancing for 10 hours in the shoes, I finally understood how to use them and the little performative tricks I could play to make it seem like there was more going on than there really was. One of the perks of having a team in this case was that Yin could explain what was happening while I just danced a storm.

Here is the final version of Larry, a quicktime movie (uncomressed, so rather large).

And an applet in case you want to want to make Larry jump on your own!  It’s a little slow on the uptake, so just wait for it.  All the source code is available there.  Eric Mika helped with making Larry jump in the end, by giving us an example using gravity and velocity.

Happy jumping!

Nearly 2 months ago Morgen Fleisig and I set out to create an animated man. The name: Larry. The language: Processing. The mission: make that man run. We encountered much hardship in the form of radians, PI, angles and arrays.  But ‘lo, we are on track and prevailing. It all started when we agreed that Muybridge was an interesting fellow, and that to emulate him using Processing would be rather rad. We tracked some of his work on YouTube and through image searches.

To make things easier we decided to make a simple wire frame human being adapted from the arm example in Processing. (more…)

The second serial lab. There is a lot to learn when it comes to serial communication between devices and applications. No doubt I will be working hard over the winter break to get serial communication into my blood, to have the handshake method down cold, to master punctuation and prevent binary from byting my ASCII. Sending data serially is a beautiful, complex beast. Most of what’s covered in the two serial labs was key in Beat Feet, the mid-term project that Eric, Yin and I built. We used Zigbees to send data from sensors on a pair of shoes and hat to the computer which played back sound files or MIDI library depending on which sensor was triggered. What we did with that project was more interesting and involved than what I ended up making for the second serial lab, which is basically what was outlined in the examples. The video at the bottom shows an accelerometer and an Arduino used to move a ball around on the screen in Processing. The button makes the ball appear or disappear. (more…)

Or maybe we should call it BetaFeta, but that would be cheesy. If we’re in a triumphant vegetative state, BeetFeat.

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I like working with serial from Arduino to Processing. It makes me a little giddy.

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I made a couple of different things for the first ICM assignment in Processing. One Alphalpha Squares, a grid-like series of boxes with varying shades of stroke and fill. I played with color and alpha, and worked on super-imposing with transparency.  There is no interaction.  The second piece I worked on is an extension of something I made this summer– a self-portrait. I used mouseX and mouseY extensively to get the entire picture as a whole to follow the movement of the mouse. Clicking the mouse or the keyboard produce motions in the mouth that simulate talking. I couldn’t figure out how to make the eye balls move upon clicking the mouse. How does one make an object move?  Subtract the previous position while adding the new position?  I’m sure we’ll get to this..

I have been having trouble uploading the second picture (new self-portrait) to the ITP server using Fugu. I had help uploading the squares, but didn’t have time to write down the step-by-step details. It gives me this error message: “Warning: OpenSHH’s sftp cannot yet download directories. Would you like to download week01.1 to /Users/arturbo/Public/ICM2009 with SCP instead?”  Try again later , I will.

UPDATE: Here’s the 2nd one, uploaded nicely: Wow! Self-Portrait (click mouse and any key)

what happened was this: I changed over to Fetch from Fugu (better interface), and deleted all the applet files, and then re-transferred them. Then Matt Parker pointed out that my folder said “week01.1″ and that Fugu probably doesn’t recognize “.”  Changed it to “_” and it worked.