Coding and Crafting

Turning your ideas into a reality is often much more complicated than you envision.  As Adriana and I attempt to take the immigrant's suitcase from a plan to a physical fabrication, we have had moments of progress, but also many instances of staring blankly at our computers, slamming our hands on the keyboard (ok that was just me, not Adriana) and wondering aloud if we will ever figure out how to program.

We may resort to this...

The process of programming our exhibit seems straightforward enough - create a program that opens iMovie when an RFID tag is scanned - and presto! you have our exhibit.  However, we have discovered that this is quite a complicated task for programming newbies.  Learning the language of the different programs involved is difficult.  We have to create a script in Processing that connects to a script in Arduino through Firmata that will successfully start iMovie, where the content of our exhibit will reside.  So it takes these three programs, plus RFID tags, an RFID reader, and a bunch of wires to make this work.

The combination of new programs and different technology is a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, Adriana and I spent the entire day last Thursday trying to figure out the right script to make our little exhibit run.  We took it one step at a time, focusing on a script that would open a movie using Processing.  Because we need our exhibit to open three different movies, we decided to try a script that could open three different movies, depending on the key that was pressed.  We thought that if we could figure this out, we could then move on to opening the movies using the RFID tags.

Surprisingly, we did have some moderate success.  Using the reference resources on the Processing website, we were able to create a script that could run one movie when a specific key was pressed. At this point, I think we gave each other high fives and threw out a "Hallelujah!"  However, when we added two more movies and two more keys to the script, it became a little more complicated.

Our attempt at a Processing script

When we ran the above script, we could press the specified keys and get the audio of the movies to play, but not the visual.  While we were pretty proud of ourselves for accomplishing this, it is not the result we were hoping for.  But at the very least, it does give us something to work with as we try and figure out our next steps.  We are pretty sure that the problem lies in putting the movie files in the "void draw" part of the script rather than the "void setup" section.  However, when we moved the movie files to the "void setup," all three started playing at once!

Because we are uncertain of how to fix our problems, we have diverted our attention from the programming of the exhibit and focused on its physical fabrication.  I am using "physical fabrication" as a fancy term for crafting.  Basically, Adriana and I spent all day Monday doing paper mache and painting to create an oldish looking suitcase to serve as the vehicle for showing our movies. It may resemble some of the projects you did in Kindergarten, but at least we made progress in one area of our exhibit.

We love paper mache 

Speeding up the drying process 

Channelling da Vinci

 Painting

 The finished product

It's starting to take shape

If we end up failing spectacularly in programming our exhibit, at the end of the day, we have a pretty ok suitcase to show off.  Anyone hiring crafters?