ponnuki

So I’ve been playing with an arduino lately – with the help of pure dyne to connect to it.

The arduino is a toy for hacker – for hardware hacker or electronic enthusiast. I got it on ebay with an lcd screen with it and since I am starting to built a midi mixer (with some doepfer diy kit) I wanted to test some knobs and pots actions.

I’m not at the point to send signals from the arduino to the computer just yet – I am sure it’s not hard but haven’t been there. So in order to test any knob action I decided to use the lcd. To make thing even easier I bough some premade potentiometer with a shield that connects the potentiometer to the arduino. I agree that is being really lazy because when you start using the arduino you find quite early that connecting a switch or a potentiometer is the ‘hello world’ of arduino, or in layman term ‘it just take 3 wires and a resistance’. Cutting the crap here is what I did:

• arduino mega board
• 9v battery connector
• shield for knobs and sliders
• LCD shield to show the result

Without any idea of what I was doing I made a sandwich with the 3 board, stacking the sensor shield in between the arduino and the lcd shield, then connecting a knob to the first connection. I loaded the default example that comes with the lcd screen. At first the button on the screen wouldn’t work anymore. I realized that it was connecting on the same ‘in’ as my potentiometer. So playing around with the potentiometer I saw it was changing something on the screen! Hurray!

Hacking the example a little, to create something that make sense I ended up prototyping a volume knob that would indicate the level on the lcd screen. That was fun!

It was fun to realized that the shield are stack-able. Of course at this point this system is not usable it was mostly to test the interactivity with some knob action. Since I got an Arduino I can’t realize how easy it is to create fun stuff. This is also my first step at creating a complete usd midi mixer system to work with Mixxx

So continuing my quest to learn processing. It’s a beautiful language really simple and well structured. I think it’s a really great way to learn programming at large.

This is my first ‘game’, or an interactive program that has a goal, a score and where difficulty increase the higher the score get. Now bare with me, this is not object oriented, I don’t use any fancy codes and now that I am learning about object oriented and class and array this code doesn’t really make sense at this point.

But it’s a great learning. If you are learning processing it’s a nice example of what can be done quickly without much knowledge.

BLOOD – the goal of the game is to mouse over the first drop of blood. There is so many drops that it would be impossible so the first drop get brighter and brighter the more drops fall. It’s a really simple randomization of translucide ellipse, and every frame an if check if your mouse is over that random first drop. In order to make it easier, the mouse position check is larger (+/- 10px). Every time the mouse position align with the first drop the screen clear, the drop starts small again and the speed increase. If the size of the drop gets bigger than the screen then you ran out of blood = you are game over !

Click here to play the game!