For this project, I wanted to recreate a peaceful scene of a frog sitting on a lily pad in a pond. Since I hadn’t worked much with sensors yet, I thought this would be the opportunity to incorporate one. I decided to use a distance sensor to control the ripples in the water, the closer your hand gets to the sensor, the more frequently the frog hops and creates ripples.
The Arduino codesimply measures how far away your hand is from the sensor and sends that data to the p5.js code. The Arduino code measures distance by sending an ultrasonic pulse and calculating how long it takes to bounce back, then converts that time into cms using the speed of sound (0.034 cm/microsecond) divided by 2 since the sound travels to the object and back.
The p5.j code then uses that distance data to dictate how often the ripples should occur. In the p5 code, I also hosted the visuals/art element of the project.
Next time, I think it would be fun to use a pressure sensor and have users actually jump up and down at different strengths and show that on p5.js.
// ARDUINO CODE
const int trigPin = 9;
const int echoPin = 10;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(trigPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(echoPin, INPUT);
}
void loop() {
// measure distance
digitalWrite(trigPin, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(2);
digitalWrite(trigPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(10);
digitalWrite(trigPin, LOW);
long duration = pulseIn(echoPin, HIGH);
int distance = duration * 0.034 / 2;
// send distance to p5.js
Serial.println(distance);
delay(50);
}
