I was building the 3D printer for the lab and noticed how the extruder moves across the X and Y axes. There are two motors, each moving the extruder in one or the other axis. By working both motors together, the extruder can be moved to any X or Y position. This is where I got my final project idea from. I’m going to make a raised tray and fill it with sand, and place one metal ball bearing on the sand surface, like in this picture:
There’s going to be a magnet underneath the table, which attracts the ball, and by moving the magnet, I’ll be able to move the ball on the sand and draw patterns. The magnet is going to be moved across the X and Y axes using two motors, like in the 3D printer. There are a bunch of belts in the IM lab storage, just like the ones that are used in the 3D printer, and I’m hoping that I get to use those for my purposes. If not, I would probably have to order them myself.
This is where p5 comes in: the Arduino controls the motors, but the Arduino is controlled by user input from p5. Users can maybe use keyboard arrows to move a virtual ball on the canvas, and that motion will be replicated by the real ball. I haven’t really pinned down what the user interaction would look like: it could also be users painting with their finger on a touch screen, but the issue with that might be that users might just move their fingers faster than the motors are able to move the ball, so that wouldn’t work. One simple way to tackle this would be to just reduce the frame rate on p5, so that users can’t draw that fast, and the motors are able to keep up.
I would also want to program a “default” mode, so that when there’s no users, the ball draws nice, symmetric shapes on its own. That way, the project could be a nice, standalone art installation, but also interactive.