Kick Me: Finished!

We got our xbee/fsr controlled kick game for Mesh Networking working today!

The icons come out on a broadcasted beat, which our xbee picks up, and then are 'kicked' to one of four environments, depending on which force sensor pad the player stomps on.

So okay, we aren't actually 'kicking' anymore; it's now 'Stomp Me'. Or alternately Kick (Stomp) - A - Mole (Icon).

Anyways, here's a screen cap:



And the Processing source code:

SRC

xbee game (as yet unnamed)

My group and I decided to make a little foot-eye coordination game, coordinated to a xbee broadcasted beat. The parts to our project are as such:

- a physical interface consisting of a kick pad with FSRs in them, for recording which pad was kicked and how hard.
- the hardware involving an xbee and arduino, for capturing the broadcast beats and fsr readings
- the software, processing, for displaying our environment, which will be updated per the data sent over from our arduino.

Basically, our processing environment consists of four areas: a forest, a city, a desert, and a river. The screen will be divided into four equal parts for each eco-system. Moving along the bottom of the screen (coordinated to every 2nd broadcast beat) will be a conveyor belt, carrying with it three different kinds of icons: an egg, a baby, or a seed:



These icons will drop onto the conveyor belt in coordination with the broadcasted beat. Depending on which FSR pad you kick, you can send each of these icons out into one of the four environments. How hard you kick the pad will determine how far out 'into' the screen the icon travels. Finally, depending on which icon you kicked and which environment it landed in, the egg/seed/baby will grow into a specific animal/plant/character. For example, if you kick the baby into the city/desert/forest/river, you will get:



So far, we have designed our icons and have the core architecture of the processing program in place. We also have been able to pick up the broadcasted beat and are working on putting together a kick pad.

We have divided up the labor as such:

Shin-yi + Sarah: Graphics/Animation/Processing programming
Daniel + Shilya: Kick pads and hardware programming

Actions, Events, and Filtering

I wrote a program in processing that reacts to how vigorously you shake an accelerometer.

The arduino communicates the sensor's readings through a serial connection to processing. I used a smoothing function, in my arduino code, to get clean values from the accelerometer, which tends to give very eradict readings otherwise.

calm
Originally uploaded by 0x000000.

When you first open up the processing app, it is a calm, blue day.

planting
Originally uploaded by 0x000000.

If you make it so that the sensor's readings match up on the x- and y-axis, you plant flowers on the screen.

blowing
Originally uploaded by 0x000000.

Slightly shaking it causes the blooms to blow...

storm
Originally uploaded by 0x000000.

Quickly shaking it causes a rain storm (and all the flowers blow away)


Leaving the sensor alone for 10 seconds let's the storm go away, returning you to a clear day.

Download Processing and Arduino code

Sensors and Time

sensorGraph
Originally uploaded by 0x000000.

I built a little visualisation tool, using processing, for graphing sensor activity. In this case, I was specifically looking at a photocell. The nature of the data being sensed, in this case, light, informed the way I chose to display the data.

There are three parameters being graphed here: raw data, averaged readings, and the standard deviation between readings.

The circuit is really simple. It's just a photocell hooked up to an arduino board analog in pin. My arduino board communicates serially to my processing app, which then displays the data accordingly.

Download my code here: arduino | processing