Weird Things that Draw

Building a knock sensor from the Arduino example book. Can't get the mechanism to lock up again, thus making it useless, and a largely conceptual piece!

A little coke can detection system. Tells you whether or not your fridge is stocked (when it is, the red LED turns on). The current runs through a metallic ruler, which hooks up to a tattoo needle and closes the circuit if a coke can is placed in between. 

I've been using the STT voice recognition library for Processing. On the left hand side of the canvas, a 20 minute compilation of footage is played on a loop, while on the right, a text-field stands ready. Using voice recognition, the user gives the program a year (ex. "1949"). The program then passes the result of the voice recognition to Wikipedia, and downloads the resulting XML. It then parses the XML, standardizing it, and formatting it so that it will fit in the text field on the right of the video. At the same time, the sketch jumps to the point in the video that matches the "year" command (ex. second # 1949). In a second variation of the sketch, a mask is overlaid on the video. The process is somewhat laggy, not immediate enough to create the effect of crisp and effortless response. 

The program uses the BlobTracker library to modify the pitch and panning of a music file. Originally developed as a simple theremin that a fish would play based on camera input - I've modified it slightly so that it will modify a piece of music using the Sonia library (the only one I've found that will actually modify pitch on an mp3 or aif file). I'm trying to add background subtraction to isolate an element, but it's resulting in a very slow program, and a highly delayed response time.

Using blobs detected in an image to alter the pitch and panning of a piece of music.

The photos below show a small program where all dots - objects - are interconnected. A function is incorporated that calculates the distance between the dots, allowing control for the amount of dots that are connected with a threshold slider.

Line drawer with an adjustable threshold. 

Rotator Clock in action.

The goal was to write up a simple clock - something that kept track of seconds, minutes, and perhaps hours. I decided to update the sketch I posted before (Noisy Circle!) so that it would keep time with seconds and minutes. One ring would rotate around the X axis according to seconds, the other would rotate around the Y axis keeping track of minutes.  Problems, Issues, Existentialism: Initially, only half of a ring would show up - after asking around, no one really knew what was going on. While I had coded an entire ring to be drawn (so, if looked at straight on, it would look like a circle), only one half of it would actually be visible while rotating. After a while, it occurred to me that this was happening because the ring, while being rotated by rotateX() was intersecting with the rectangle object I was drawing as a background. I pushed an popped some matrixes, moving the rectangle back, and everything was well. The two rings are now visible. The issue that recurs is that the circles seem to be drawn off-axis. Ideally, they would be drawn around the 0, 0 point, then translated to width/2, height/2 - nonetheless, when this happens, they always appear slightly off axis, so that when they are rotated, they go through a weird orbiting motion. I suspect this has to do with the fact that the circles have noise incorporated into their positioning, so that their starting points are never truly the same.