Work done

Unfortunately, I was unable to spend too much time on this project this week as I have a major assignment due for my other courses, this meant that my prototype took the backseat as I needed a break from coursework after all my submissions. Despite putting off work for a bit, I was still able to investigate the suitability of using processing to output sound. Based on resources from slack I followed a guide to connecting my Arduino code to processing code, programming in Processing, however, is quite confusing as its sort of JAVA but not really, meaning that I had to spend some time understanding the documentation. Using the Minim Lib in Processing, I was able to play audio on processing by feeding an mp3 file into an audio player. I was also able to read from the serial port to which my Arduino was connected but I had to figure out and refractor my Arduino code to send information to the serial port when pressure is sensed. Utilizing concepts from button states, I had to figure out how to send information based on which button was pressed to the serial port which was the tricky part. This took a lot of time debugging as I was trying to send a variable “play” to the serial port to trigger playing audio, however, I realized that my variable had a /n newline element that I could not see in the console, this took me a while to figure out and I found it was best to trim the variable to avoid time-consuming bugs in the future.

my buggy code fix:

By the end of this week, I was able to test that audio is able to be played using Processing but I am yet to figure out how to refactor my code to be constantly sending information to serial only when button states change. This is more of a logical challenge as I’m not used to processing programming, I think it would be best for me to ideate a solution on paper and execute it to improve the efficiency of my codebase, speaking of the codebase, I’m quite pleased that I found a bug in my original codebase that caused a delay in displaying lights, this was due to the code structure I had implemented. Looking back, it would have been better if I had worked more on the musical element of my prototype instead of mocking it in the previous submission as the main theme of my concept is musical things, it would have been better to solve the big issue of outputting music first and then move on to color theory, based on suggestions, I was able to explore Ableton as well but it might have been too complicated for me to understand.

Plan for next week

Looking forward, I should be on track to completing my portfolio in the coming week, I should be starting on condensing my process and concepts to be included in my final portfolio along with documenting my work through imagery. knowing my skills in HTML I'm quite concerned that my website would be looking quite plain as im pretty bad with CSS but ill cross that bridge when I get to it.

inspiration/tutorial I found helpful