Exercise 1
For this exercise, we decided to use Ultrasonic sensor because we thought it will interesting to control the ellipse with our hand kind of like in video games Wii. Wherein based on your physical hand movement the objects move on the screen. To proceed with this idea, we first made a connection to the Arduino on P5.js, similar to how we did it in class. Then to control the x-axis we first read the serial write in P5.js and then mapped the value read from 0 to windowWidth. Another thing we noticed while performing this assignment is that the movement for ellipse was very abrupt and so we used a function called ‘lerp’. I had previously used this function for one of the P5 assignments and so I recalled that to smooth distance we can use this function. This function basically generates a value between my last x position to the current measured distance at certain interval (0.1 in this case). This makes sure that the circle moves in a smooth movement. Below I have attached my code to P5 and Arduino along with the demonstration video.
Exercise 2
For the second exercise, we chose to create a visual representation of the conversion from one side to another. Inspired by the chess clock, where time shifts between players while playing. We designed the LEDs so that as one grows brighter, the other dims, in turn symbolizing the passing of control from one side to the other. We started by first establishing the serial connection between Arduino and p5.js, similar to the previous exercise and what we did in class. In the p5 we created a slider ranging from 0 to 255, which we used to determine the brightness of LED 1, then for LED 2 we then set the inverse of that value so that as one increased, the other decreased. We continuously sent these two mapped values through serial in the format “value1,value2” and read them on the Arduino side to update the LED brightness using analogWrite. This setup allowed us to control both LEDs simultaneously from the browser and visually see the transition between them. Below are the p5.js and Arduino code along with the demonstration video.
Exercise 3
To complete this exercise we made changes to the gravity ball code provided. We first made sure that the LED lights up everytime the ball bounces to do so we maintained a state variable so everytime the ball touches ground we switched the state to HIGH else we set the state to LOW. This helped us achieve the goal. For the second module of this exercise, we decided to use our concept in exercise 1 i.e. ultrasonic sensor to control the wind movement of the ball. We looked at our distance from ultrasonic sensor and then decided to set a threshold of 50. So if the distance is >50, we set the wind speed to -3, else 3. This helped to move the ball in different directions and control it with our hand. We have provided the P5.js and Arduino code below for your references.