Friday 14 December 2012

Red carpet's project


Description
The red carpet's project was an interactive installation that my company wanted to build for the Christmas party.
Basically the idea was to create a little interactive space where people could walk through this red carpet and some paparazzi would display on the wall.
This wasn't enough to make an amazing experience, so we decided to implement 24 leds around the area where the video was projected and flashed all of them like a real flash.
We also decided to implement an area to take a picture of  yourself and display it into the slideshow.

Video presentation
LEDs matrix
I have builded 6 panels of leds and a big bus of 24 cables to control all leds, I chosen to use a transistor and an external power supply to light all of them, and also a shift register to control them.
This was the shift register with 24 outputs
Each panel have a "home made connector" to make the installation easier and comfortable to carry.

These were 5 panels when I was testing them

My little PCB with led and transistor

Pressure Mat
I have connected 2 pressure mats on my Arduino that have two pins to make it works, one ground input and the output to detect you have triggered it, you can buy them here .
When you step on the first mat the paparazzi movie starts and all 24 leds are starting to flash randomly. And then when you reach the second one, it triggers the count down to make the pose and display it on the slideshow.

Camera trigger
The camera trigger was made with openFramework and the Canon's SDK.
This part wasn't made by me but I have made a similar program with Processing that does the same.
More information about Camera and animation integration are posted to this link

Result
The final installation, its missing some decoration to cover all wires and tapes


We are enjoying the red carpet :)

Even with a lot of people it was a great experience 


Video


People are enjoying the experience:




Testing some leds with a random sequence:




General overview of the installation:



Little tour after I finished to wire up:







Monday 10 December 2012

First steps with Raspberry PI

Introduction
I have got my first Raspberry PI last week and I started to discover this beautiful world but I am a little bit upset about low level connection.


These are the bad things:
- You can't read from an analog input if you don't buy a board that helps you to get this information ( click here ).
- You can't move 2-3 servos if you don't buy a 16 channel servo driver ( click here ).
At least there are some solutions to pimp your Raspberry PI :)



My first steps
I have decided to move my old and unfinished Arduino project to Raspberry PI and after 2 days of working I have done a lot of work that Arduino takes a lot of time.
I never tried to connect something to a digital pin and I thought that was simple as Arduino, but when I was looking for the right pin, I couldn't understand from the board which one was the right one.
I had to looking for the schema of Raspberry and found out each digital pin, that it's silly because they could put something like GPIO 1, GPIO 2, just next to each pin.

In the end I am connected my DHT 22 ( temperature sensor ) to the pin GPIO 4 and installed a little script in C, because Python is not faster enough to get the data. This is the guide that I followed (click here).