29th
This is the software side of the hacked mouse image gallery. The hardware side has not yet been implemented. When run in a browser, the processing program tends to lag.
Keys 1-8 control blow points. The ‘n’ key moves to the next image.
The concept for this project came from a brainstorming time in class. I was planning on creating something involving an air pump, and Justin Herrara suggested blowing sand or leaves off of an image. That is exactly what I’m doing.
In the hardware side, my original thought was to mount 4 wind sensors around a screen laying flat on the desk - one on each side. When the user blows at the screen, the sand will move away, revealing the image beneath. However, after further thought, I realized I can create a weather vane that is directly connected to one of the mouse axis.
It was a lot of work to get this thing working. First I tried to figure out the math by myself and got really frustrated. Eventually I found traer.physics, a physics library in which I could create particles with attraction. By giving each grain of sand a negative attraction to the wind origin, I was able to blow them away.
Implementing the images was fairly simple, although I spent lots of time creating a system that automatically collects all image files from a certain directory (as opposed to manually entering their names into an array). When I put the program together, I couldn’t get this system to work, so I went with the easy, traditional image array instead.
The next step is creating the wind sensors, and programming a bit more code to get them working.
