Glass Block LED Matrix, controlled outdoors via tablet
Short version: Using an Android tablet, you can draw things on our Glass Block LED Matrix from the street, and it’s pretty awesome. Video here, photos here.
Long version:
Things have progressed recently on the Glass Block LED Matrix which Chris Davis and Paul Vincent started. For a couple weeks, the code was already in place to let Processing talk to it via simple serial commands to the Arduino & ShiftBrite shield. We wanted to use the tools from Project Blinkenlights to control things over the network; while this didn’t entirely work as planned, the project offered a lot of ideas and inspiration.
The most recent addition I made was the inclusion of oscP5 to the Processing sketch to let it listen for OSC (Open Sound Control) messages. As it happens, a brilliant piece of free software already exists (Control from Charlie Roberts) which turns Android/iOS devices into control surfaces that send out OSC messages. On top of this, Control comes with a handful of example UIs, one of them being “Multibutton Demo” which provides a UI with an 8×8 button grid, sort of like a monome. (The tablet in all of the photos is running Control with that Multibutton Demo UI.)
As our LED matrix is 7×8, this UI was a good initial match. I set Control’s destination URL/port to the backend machine that was running Processing, set the sketch to parse the pretty simple OSC messages Control would send out at every button toggle, and then I was able to control what was on the LED matrix by drawing on that 8×8 grid on my tablet.
I finally got to show it off outside on Tuesday evening when it was dark, and it’s working pretty well, as the video shows.
Next steps:
- Making a Control UI that allows for color control. These are RGB LEDs, after all – we can control intensity and color, not just whether they’re on or off.
- Making this web-enabled. I think Control allows this?
- Fixing the glitchiness that I didn’t show in the video; something cryptic is going on on the Arduino side.
Check out the github project here and the project wiki page here.
Android Development 101 class has been sold out. I’ve had some requests to be put on a backup list if anybody drops out of class. Eventbrite will probably show an opening if somebody drops out but we are currently NOT doing an official wait list. We are however going to have another android development class sometime early 2011 for those who can not attend this class. We know the class size is small but we feel that this is a good thing…we just need to have more classes :)
Learn how to program your own custom applications for Android devices. This class will go through the quick and easy method using Google’s AppInventor then go into details on how to use Eclipse to design more complicated applications. This class will mainly focus on creating GUIs, Activities, Intents and callbacks as well as AlertBuilder. We will also discuss how to run your application in an emulator and directly on your device.
