OVERVIEW
As of this week, we had some tweaks to the concept of our whole idea. The idea will now center on connecting two people and two lamps to a single computer. This week has been filled with a range of challenges that have put our knowledge of Arduino and p5js to the test. Integrating a touch sensor to send data from Arduino to p5js and collecting and transmitting several bytes of information from p5js to Arduino are some examples of the operations that fall under this category. Among the concept adjustments we made was to use regular wire serial communication between Arduino and p5js rather than relying on the use of a bluetooth module, which would have made the project more interesting.
PROGRESS
At the moment we are struggling with successfully sending RGB values from p5js to Arduino and eventually displaying them on the LED strip. As of now, when we transmit specified color values from p5js to Arduino, they are displayed on the LED strip as intended. However, only the color white is projected on the LED strip when we send any other RGB values. Additionally, the lights do not “cycle” through their respective patterns like they should. For example, when we chose “flicker”, the lights flicker once and remain off, instead of flickering continuously as intended in the Arduino code. We started by doing a number of comprehensive tests to rule out the possibility that the issue could be with the serial transmission. The only remaining hypotheses for the bugs that we are still investigating are if the problem could be caused by using the jpg color wheel to determine color values or whether there are more mechanisms involving how Arduino interacts with LED strips that we need to comprehend. The below is a compilation of test-related videos:
(lights only showing white and not looping continuously)
(testing the color printed in the console vs the color that appeared to be chosen from the wheel and seeing that they two colors do not match up)
SOLUTION
After several hours of debugging, we found that using an image to pick the color just wasn’t working. We determined our hypothesis to be correct – that the issue was the values being sent by p5.js.
The mouse position was taking pixels from the original image and it was not being remapped to the resized and re positioned image we had in our code, even after applying the map function and several iterations of repositioning/resizing the image. We believe that the example used ( link ) to create the color picker worked because the image IS the canvas, which is not the case for ours.
We decided on a new way for the user to select the color, which would be by having an object that flashes a different color every few seconds where the user can then press a key to “freeze” the object on the selected color. In our updated sketch, all possible colors have been predetermined by us, though the process of choosing the color is more engaging now.
After making this change, the values sent to Arduino were actually representative of the color that was chosen when pressing a key, and the color that is displayed on the LED’s is now accurate. However, this did not solve the issue of the lights not looping.