Vivid pirates
We formed this group, Vivid Pirates, during the class in week 2, with Felix Chiu, Patrick Lu , Prevash Datt and me ( Yichao Ricky Xue ) involved.
As a new member of this team, I had no idea of what Euphonious Mobius is since
I was not in the same class as my other team members last year. So at the beginning
stage, I spent a long time, trying to understand this concept and the structure
of the model they’ve made for vivid festival 2013. By the end of that studio
class, every each one of us has been assigned different works and roles for
group development, and I’m responsible as a programmer / interactivity designer,
majority in grasshopper scripting. In the following week, we got some arduino
kits given by Mr.Russel as one of our tools to work toward ideal
interactivities.
Having understood how will arduino benefit
our structure, we ended up with three sensors and have a few ideas of
interactivities assigned to each sensor, as I’ve mentioned in one of my blog
entries ( Ideas for interactivities ) .
As I’ve done some arduino work and photo
resistor ( light sensor ) in the past few years, I took the responsibility of
working on it for interactivity creation.
Every beginning is difficult, I got many
problems with my arduino kit such as data not sending to grasshopper, before
moving on to the next step, I decided to look for some tutorials of arduino and
grasshopper firefly.
Yes , of course I’ve got those basic issues
solved later on and started to move onto interactivity creating stage.
Originally , my idea was to run multiple LEDs on my arduino board straight away
without firefly, therefore I went online and bought couple of big arduino bread
boards and a pack of RGB LEDs for my development. As I was moving on, I found
out it is really hard hooking hundreds of LEDs on arduino for coding and making
interactivity by using various of sensors. I had a talk with Felix, our team
leader and programmer, and I was told that large amount of LEDs could be
controlled by light controller via Rhino grasshopper.
Got an easier way, why don’t we do it . I
started to write scripts on grasshopper instead of arduino. With the help of
Steve during studio session, I’ve created a smooth code of shooting star, and
another script for twinkle interactivity, the original scripts was written by
Prevash , and I’ve improved it by adding a basic if statement and hooking up
with light sensor via arduino. Both of these two developments could be found on
my individual blog. Both of them looked well on screen but we still have to
make sure that they fit our grid and real structure.
Right now in week 8 , me and our group ,
VividPirates have almost done with interactivity designing and program
scripting, our next step is to put what we have already created onto our
structure and see if they fit our expectations. And of course, I will keep
working on scripting and coding and do whatever I could to help my team reach
the final aim.
During extracurricular sessions since week 3,
I’ve been working with Rebekah and her team member for structure modeling at
Redfern studio for Vivid Sydney 2013, improving my understanding toward this project
and refreshing my mind when designing interactivities based on real structure.
I’ve had a lot of fun from it .
