Potentiometer test

The potentiometers work with the RGB led. It should be fine with a 9v battery, but I'll test it just in case anyway.

Below are pictures of the circuit and a drawn diagram of it.

Basically the turning gear is attached to the "poll" of the potentiometer.

You can get a full range of colours just like when the colour cycle was controlled by the Arduino. True, controlling the colours with Arduino is more sophisticated while the potentiometer is more basic and crude. But that's the point of it. Reducing the interaction into something that is dominantly physical and less controlled through digital means.

Gears

Sorted out gears with Jenny. At first there were problems with timing and it didn't look like anything was happening. At least, not fast enough to meet the deadline. I began to wonder if the gears were actually that crucial. Does it add more to what we want to say about the project? The fact that it's a gear isn't important. It's the physical element in a gear that makes it relevant to what we're doing. So I'd say it doesn't necessarily add more, but it reinforces what we're aiming for in terms of a very physical interaction as opposed to a digital one.

We went through a long list of different gears that we thought might work. But the thing is they don't work. Either because the teeth don't make sense or the gear doesn't change direction. Below are drawings of all the failed ones. It's rather messy, but you get the idea.

In the end the set of gears that do work for what we want is the same as those found in eggbeaters.

Now that that's sorted we'll leave it up to Jenny to get that bit done and add any more developments.

Another RGB test

Different printers give different results. Got two sets of one test printed. One set on the home printer and another from the printing service at Warehouse Stationery.

There's a huge difference in how the colours came out between the two sets. I tested both to see how well coloured light works to make colours appear and disappear.

The home set didn't work as well as the WS set. This may be because the WS set's colour values are much closer to the colours I set on the computer compared to the home set. The colours from WS set are also far more vivid.

Part of this latest set was layering the colours on top of each other as well as testing triples.

Above is an example of the layering tests I did with the triples along with the video of that very same test. The layering I did works in revealing the forms of the shapes when colours appear and disappear. But I think there is a better way to do it. Here I've cut horizontal lines to each colour. The only problem here is that a section of the circle contains no yellow. A better way to do it may be with dots or a different way of setting up the horizontal lines.

The current triples shown here, in this chart are based on the previous test prints, which were done on the home printer.

Since the WS set is shown to be different I printed the full list of seven original colours in addition to cyan, magenta and yellow. Same digital values as the previous one, but printed by WS printer. This is to look for differences and to make the results more up to date. Below is the latest results. The top line refers to colours of light while the rest refer to printed colour. Basically, what happens is some colour turn black and some colours disappear depending on what colour the light is.

Triples are found when they meet these conditions:

-At any one time two of the three colours would disappear on a colour of light.
-All three colours turn black on a different colour of light.

Various triples have been tested but the best is cyan-magenta-yellow. You can see this in the video below.



The first row of colours are yellow, cyan, and magenta from left to right. Note that they all turn black on a different colour. Two of the colours also disappear on certain colours when one is turned black. Although yellow and magenta do darken on blue, the difference in darkness between the two is enough to set it apart from the other triples. With the other triples the difference in darkness is too small.

There were some key differences. For instance, as stated before the cyan-magenta-yellow triple worked most effectively compared to other triples in the WS set. When in the home set it didn't work at all when blue light was shone on it. Therefore, the set to use would be WS as the colours are closer to the values I set. And the triple to use would be cyan-magenta-yellow. Some other triples do work, but not as effectively. For example, some colours would darken at the same time as another. That you don't want.

An interesting thing about the WS set is that purple light turns certain colours (red, orange, yellows) into very bright neon colours (can also see this in the video above). This could be something that we can use if we need it.

Key Theme and Animation Content

The story of the project is how, as a group, we struggled to find unity. Or at least a thread that connects each part of the project together. As actual people, it was trouble in finding something that connect our ideas, ways of thinking, and visions into one.

This aspect has dominated the project throughout this semester. Manifesting itself as conflicting opinions, difficulty in translating ideas into someone else's way of thinking, and sluggish, ineffective decision making. So naturally, in the content for animation this is what the story is about.

Now that we have a theme, we had to create symbols and imagery to represent how we feel about this semester. This is for the animation. First thing we did was summarising how the semester was for us in one word. Jenny's word was lost. This described her experience of the semester where she has an idea of what she wanted to do, but didn't know where to begin. Edrian's was confusion. His one is similar to Jenny's in that he could see and had a vision of what he wanted to achieve. However, he didn't know how to make it happen. My word was trapped. I knew how to do what I wanted to do, but I didn't have a vision of how it fits into everything else.

We also pointed out key traits that make us different to each other along with some similarities that made us become a group at the very beginning. This included our ways of thinking, personality, and work habits. Then they were all summarised into one package for easier understanding: animals.

Jenny's personality is personified as a bear. She has a dominant personality and is very opinionated. Also very assertive and sometimes stubborn. Has big dreams and enjoys eating.

Edrian identified most as a dog. He is very friendly and loyal to friends. Questions a lot; is curious. Also good at talking to people and making them feel comfortable. Style of thinking of strongly visual.

My animal is a cat. I'm independent and introverted, preferring to go off and do things on my own. More inclined to be experimental; is curious as well. I switch hobbies often.

With the theme sorted out and a starting point for inspiration in imagery we have enough to brainstorm on things going in the animation. At this stage we left it to Edrian to work on this aspect. I think it will go great because this is where he will be in his element. 

Presentation and Final Plan

Presentation feedback was helpful and fair in my opinion. It's true that we don't have enough time to do a full blown complex animation that's layered. But there IS a better way which I'll cover later further down, I talked about it briefly in the previous blog post.

Some suggestions were offered to us both before and during the presentation. Prior to the presentation an option was to have still images where the animation would be revealed through changing colours. During the presentation there were a variety based off the still image alternative. For example, changing patterns on the wall or something similar to comic book style changes in image. So it's a little like an animation. Another was to simply have a series of still images revealed by different colours and to spin around or run around to animate them. These are "nice" but inelegant solutions on what we can do with hiding and revealing certain colours. These dumb down the idea and it isn't what we do. So we've clearly ignored these and come up with a better solution that fits what we want.

At presentation I showed the latest RGB light test. Some colours work, some don't. In the final it won't need the Arduino at all and to clarify, none of the colour orders would be predetermined. That depends on where the user turns the gears.




How do the gears connect to the lights? With potentiometers. Jason says you can get potentiometers that turn right around continuously. Before we knew that though I found an example of a particular gear type that can change directions (Chou, 2007).



We were planning on using that to be able to turn the potentiometers smoothly so that there's not a big change from full brightness to no brightness.



Andy suggested that the gears push buttons at specific points to turn the LEDs on and off. I think a saw-tooth shaped gear like those in escapements would work great for that.

Figure 1. An example of an escapement gear with saw-tooth shape. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scappamento.gif

However, a smooth transition is preferred rather than flashes so we're going to stick with the original gear in mind. This is also because we couldn't actually find any potentiometers that could spin around forever. As for taking apart the potentiometer, that's another option. However, it allows more chances for human error and wastage. We don't have time for that.

So what's the final plan? The final plan is to have gears controlling the turning of the potentiometers --> the potentiometers change the colour of light --> the colour of light hides and reveals certain printed colours --> moving printed bars on transparencies over them reveal an animation.

Content of the animation and the theme that pulls all elements together conceptually: struggling to find unity as a group when it comes to this project. So basically it's about unity and putting pieces together into one whole. It's the story of how this project is the way it is.



Reference List

Chou, R. [Roger Chou]. (2007, August 2). Gear System that Changes Direction [Video file]. 
       Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aobPgGzB-U

Optical Illusions

In the previous RGB test it didn't quite work out and I considered looking into optical illusions as mentioned before. I looked at some illusions but they didn't quite fit into what we're doing. Most of them involved staring at a dot so that the illusion could work, which is what we don't want. There were some very amazing paintings that don't form its shape for you unless you're at a specific perspective, these are called anamorphic paintings. However, one particular illusion is relevant to what we are trying to achieve.




In this video (brusspup, 2010) an animated optical illusion is shown where black bars move across black lines, filling in the gaps to give the illusion of a moving image from a still image. I thought this might be useful because it captures what I think animation is very clearly; an illusion where images flick by so quickly that your brain tells you it's moving.

It can also be made in 3D as shown by this product designed by John Leung (2011).


I've seen some like this before where the bars are printed on another layer a certain distance away from the bottom layer. Then when you move around, it appears as though it is animated as your perspective changes. This neat rug and coffee table uses the same concept.

At the time of looking at this type of optical illusion it was intended to replace the RGB light that didn't give the best results. However, after talking to Andy about it as a group we found that it was the RGB light that I had before that pulls all our components together into a package. So the focus should be how we should use what we've got and see what we can do with it. I did more testing with different colours and there were more printed colours that do pair up with certain colours of light. There aren't enough for a full length, complex animation, but there are more than enough to do one of these optical illusion animations. In the next post I'll go into more detail about the presentation and the new RGB light test I did.


Reference List

brusspup. (2010, May 30). Amazing Animated Optical Illusions! [Video file].
       Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq1ms2JhYBI&feature=related 
Leung, J. [johnleungdesign]. (2011, November 25). Magic Carp-pet @ Red Dot Design Award 2011 [Video file]. 
       Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua7HOX32PGA

Testing RGB leds and Printing

This morning I did tests to see for myself how different colours show up on print with different colours light like in Carnovsky's work. I didn't expect it to work though because I couldn't print true cyan, magenta, and yellow colours since they were out of gamut for printing. I need to know more about colour management and printing to see if there's a way to get around this.

There's a simple Arduino circuit I set up. There really should be some resistors on each leg of the RGB led, but since this is a quick test I'll skip out on those for now. As you can see here the printed colours aren't the ones I want. I folded up the paper so that the light can be contained in the box so that I can see what it's doing to the colours better.

The red worked really well, which surprised me. As expected cyan turns black when red light is shone on it. So if we're using red light it can turn out pretty good.

Green and blue light however, didn't work well at all. But they did turn Magenta and yellow to black respectively.

I tried it out with highlighters too on the off chance that maybe it would work or at least look interesting. Didn't really work though and the results were garish. Highlighters are not an option.

With the RGB led I also looked at cycling through the colours. I found an example by jamesotron (2013) which is a small, clear piece of code that makes it easy to understand how it cycles through the colours. Basically it fades each of the three colours at different times, which give you the smooth transitions. At this stage I don't need the colour transition because it's not necessary yet. Maybe it would be something to consider if we still use RGB and connect it up to the gears to move through the spectrum.


Reference List

jamesotron. (2013). Arduino sketch to cycle and RGB LED through the colour spectrum. Retrieved May 16, 2013, from https://gist.github.com/jamesotron/766994