the beginning of the end

Today, I made my first bit of progress towards my final project.

The overall gist? A more robust version of the "veins" toy in the previous post, controlled by a physical device tracked via camera, with various features.

The first step: the physical device itself. What better way to interact with a drawing toy than a pen?

The initial idea was to have a device that could:
>track pressure applied to the tip with an FSR, for the purpose of determining the "intensity" of the "brushstroke"
>have an LED on the end to be tracked via camera
>have a slide pot of some kind for use as a color picker

The first two were easily attainable. I had it together in no time:



The third, however, proved unattainable. I had purchased a touch-sensitive slide pot, but upon attempting to use it, found a number of practical challenges.
>it was extremely sensitive to any bending or physical interference
>it was too large to fold around the pen without significant adhesive
>bending the sensor to fold around the pen would create even more physical interference
>it would slide back to the base value instead of snapping back, which would be nearly impossible to filter out when the entire point of the interaction is an easily slide-able selector

So, for the moment, the slider is scrapped, and I'm out eight bucks.

I also tried to get the tracking aspect working - I hooked up a USB camera, and loaded up the color-tracking project available on the class Github, only to run into a number of undiagnoseable errors. At first, the raw picture showed on the right, but nothing showed on the left. Then, after a certain point (during which, of course, I acutely remember doing literally *nothing* to the scripts themselves), the web app simply refused to load, and instead crashed whatever browser it was loaded into.

For the moment, I'm trying to remain satisfied with the small bit of progress I've made.

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