mfa_digital_futures

This is useful for the motors that I’m doing a swap with for another iteration of Habitual Instinct. Switching from the SG 90 to MG90S with metal gearing!

Made some progress on the visuals by having the points update in real-time through PubNub and added a generative camera rotation. Also had the data that was being streamed in start to overlap themselves so there will only ever be a maximum of 50-100 data lines. This hopefully will help with managing computational resources of the point cloud.

Some updates that need to happen is that after an extended period of time, 30min to an hour it starts to get sluggish. Need to think of more ways to optimize it. Perhaps keeping all of the points in the cloud there and rearranging their location rather than pushing and popping them out of the particle class.

I’ve been experimenting with controlling servos through the data collected via ultrasonic sensors and getting them to interpret their surroundings. To help with getting a more animalistic movement through the servos I’ve been thinking of using Simplex Noise by Ken Perlin to help with the movement. 

To help with this in the Arduino IDE I’ve ported over and created an Arduino SimplexNoise library. 

Plotting over 100,000 data points collected over 1 hour with a 180 degree sweeping ultrasonic sensor facing an empty wall. Had to focus on optimizing the Processing sketch to prevent freezing with so many points. Also used Processing Syphon and Syphon Recorder to record the animated visualization for upload.

This is useful for saving high quality renders with the Rhino3DWIP 5.3

-ViewCaptureToFile

Going from Processing -> Rhino I had to export the object to a .obj file to import it into Rhino. Obj imported objects are meshes in Rhino which means that any other object that you create in the software doesn’t interact well with the mesh. I had was struggling with getting the mesh to convert to a polysurface or some other solution. It has been about 8 months since I used the software so I was a little rusty. 

Originally, I didn’t think that a mesh was going to be an issue but I found a solution!

You need to use the MeshtoNURB function in Rhino. Very simply:

https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/meshtonurb

http://www.intact-solutions.com/sns_documents/sns_v1/convert.htm

And you need to fix your mesh if there’s holes in it:

https://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/5/help/en-us/commands/meshrepair.htm

http://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/5/help/en-us/commands/meshpatch.htm