Arduino Uno SMD Edition

Jennifer Jennifer Presto 0 Comment

As requested, here is a summary of what’s different about the Arduino Uno SMD edition. As you can see from the pictures, the SMD edition lacks the big black chip in the middle of the board—the ATmega328 chip. According to Sparkfun, the DIP-packaged ATmega328s are getting more and more difficult to get, so the SMD edition of the Uno includes the SMD version of the ATmega328, rather than the DIP-packaged ATmega328. Most of this is total gibberish to me; however, I did discover that “DIP” stands for Dual In-Line Package, or, in layperson’s terms, the rectangle-shaped plastic housing with the two rows of little legs.

In any event, this board is supposed to function identically to the other one, except that if you want to remove the ATmega328 chip, you’ll need to use hot air. SparkFun seems to think this difference is not a big deal.

As an aside, according to Arduino, some of these boards have a problem restarting the processor. They give a range of serial numbers that are affected by this bug. However, I cannot for the the LIFE of me find the serial number on my board, so I’ll just go on faith that this isn’t one of them.

Here is a picture of the standard edition UNO board:

And here is a picture of the SMD edition:

Week 4, Libraries

Jennifer Jennifer Presto 1 Comment

Hi, ya’ll,

I downloaded the Traer Physics library and modified the Bouncy Balls example. This assignment took longer than I expected. I wound up creating a class that includes as one of its arguments an object in the library, so there’s an object within an object. (Yipes). Here is the link to the code on github. Since you can’t actually run it from github, I also uploaded it to our classroom on OpenProcessing here.

Week 3 assignment, classes, objects, and arrays

Jennifer Jennifer Presto 0 Comment

Hi, ya’ll,

This week, I really wanted to make something cheerful. So I made a Happiness Swirl. Click on any of the items to the right to set your stamp, then click on the picture to stamp that image as many times as you like. You can have any combination of stamps. When you’re done, hit “s” on your keyboard, the stamps will swirl around, and a happy surprise will be revealed.

This is beyond silly, but I do feel more comfortable with objects and arrays than I did before. I wanted to figure out how to add items to an array, in this case, on a mouse-click. I went back and forth a number of times between mousePressed() and mouseClicked(), but finally found this incredibly helpful example from Shiffman, and got a working version. As always, the project started with really unattractive, semi-functional sketches:

Week 2 assignment, Jennifer

Jennifer Jennifer Presto 0 Comment

Here is my sketch for Week 2. I wanted to try out some technical points: in particular, I tried and failed in Bootcamp to make a beating heart shape. So I wanted to make that work (yay, trigonometry!).

I wanted to make a visual representation of the passage of time without making an actual clock, since the passage of time isn’t dependent on how we’ve defined it. But I did refer to the increments that we use, since that’s how we understand it. So… when the sketch begins, each of the heart and the infinity sign takes one full minute to make a full revolution around the center (they are always on opposite sides of the sketch), and they pulse in opposing two-second beats. These times, however, are internal to the sketch itself, and do not rely on the actual time of day. The user can speed up and slow down the main orbit by pressing the up and down keys, but (like in real life) can’t reverse it, and can’t actually stop it.

The background also changes with the passage of time; however, that is directly linked to the time of day. (As a result, I think the sketch looks better at night).

In a future iteration, I’d like the sketch to be more visually interesting. I had specific animations I wanted to include, which took a little while to make work — and I feel like I understand these trig functions a lot better — but the sketch gets very repetitive very fast. (But maybe that’s in the nature of the passage of time, too).

While I was building this, I wound up making this an early phase, which I like:

I also tested the colors of the background, so you can see the full range without watching the sketch for 24 hours:

Week 1 assignment, Jennifer

Jennifer Jennifer Presto 0 Comment

Hi, ya’ll,

Here is the link to my final code project for Bootcamp, Honkerville.

I look forward to this class.  All of Bootcamp was enjoyable, and I found coding to be exceptionally rewarding.  I felt I made the most progress in that area, but Bootcamp also shone a tiny, teasing light on the vast uncharted territories within it.  I am very much looking forward to continuing the learning process, hopefully improving both my technical and design skills and sensibilities.  Having had no formal background in either, I recognize that I need much work in both, and I fully expect that process to be fulfilling and (gasp!) fun.

I know this may not be the sort of artist/designer people think of in connection with this sort of program, but I have to say that comedy is one of the art forms I like best, and Stephen Colbert is one of my all-time favorites (even though I see him far less since I stopped subscribing to cable).  I think comedy can be an incredibly effective format for political criticism and discussion, and I think he does this better than most.  And his interview with Maurice Sendak earlier this year was downright touching.

Finally, here is a link to my interactive narrative.  I’m not sure I’m exactly comfortable with the direction it wound up going, but here it is.