Animating Paper

Nitinol hounts me.

But after several burns, two minor fires, one exploded LED and a fried Arduino UNO I decided to abandon it for now. (Dont ask. I am clumsy some times...)

Instead I stumbled upon a simple but intreaguing origami folding pattern which enables motor actuated animation. I turned it into what will be our final project for coca201. The mechanics behind it, the coding, everything, is very, very simplistic. But its beautiful and I am happy about it. Take a look:



The interesting part of this is that you have paper animation as input and output.

More videoclips of the birds are here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc6EwgwI9uw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW7r0lj5CL0

*

Now, I actually am really sad about letting the nitinol be. I guess I should just get myself some propper relays and do the math and do it the propper way... but maybe another time. Also, Cameron created a really nice Max Patcher for handling projection on a moving surface...

You can take a look at this - unfinished - project here:

Arduino & Max/Msp/Jitter - Serial Communication

Ok, I recently put together a small project trying together my Arduino and Max by Cycling 74. While sending serial information from Max to Arduino is amazingly trivial, doing it the other way is not.

If you want to send information from Max to arduino, its sufficinat to just create a serial object and set the correct boud rate (for me I type in [serial c 9600] where c is port 3 and 9600 is the boud rate). Then you could connect i.e. a slider, and *magic* your sanding information. In arduino all you have to do is initilazie the serial and then use serial.read

Ok, the other way round proved to be a bit more tricky (though possibly, once I had figured it out, possibly easyer than serial communication with processing, and thats quite easy)

I made to template files. One for Arduino and one for Max. If you load the .pde file into arduino and open the Maxpatcher, you should be able to send date the other way round. There are instructions in the .pde file on how to set things up

click here to download

(this works on a p.c. running windows 7 it should work on any other operating system as well, but honestly I have no idea.)

I used this here

Hope someone out there finds this helpful.

Cheers

p.

Maybe Max isnt as terrible as I first thought

... while I still have my reservations... it does make throwing things together and quickly creating neat stuff really easy.

anyway: