Tuesday of this week, turned out to be a difficult day for getting the Fade Candy to output the colours that we want. Kimberly and I (Divya) were trying to figure out why the Fade Candy would output one type of colour and no other types. We tried changing the char 3 matrix to 4 because the char 3 only output green and white colours. The 4 char matrix was able to output more colours but extremely slow. It was causing errors in the Fade Candy server and we spent the whole of Tuesday trying different numbers, different matrix types and so on. Unfortunately there was no luck after hours and hours. We could not figure out if the problem was from the javascript code from the Fade Candy Max patch or the Max code itself. The plan was to sit on it and keeping trying throughout a course few days to debug the issue. If we do not manage to figure out the problem at all, a new plan would have to set it place. Hopefully we do not end up at that point because a new plan would be the absolute last resort.
However, on Wenesday morning, we managed to figure out the problem, hurray! It was a really "small" problem that we completely missed. We realized that that the Fade Candy can only use 3 channels and not 4, which was rgb. The second problem was that we did not "pak" and unpack" the channels in the Max code. Consequently, that was the reason why none of the colours that we set for it showed up previously. After debugging the problem, Kimberly was able to put videos into the max patch and have the Fade candy pixelize those colours from the videos onto the NeoPixel strips.
Besides the Fade Candy update, Virginia continued working on the projection videos in Max, Vanessa began soldering the first half of the front part of the structure(completed first half on Wednesday evening). Andy figured out the photoresistor code(Arduino and Max patch) which was a weight off our shoulders . Netra, Andy and Professor Micheal continued cutting and drilling more of the pipes. Ken and Professor Joel went to continue the process of laser cutting more collars. They were able to successfully cut approximately 70 collars. We also decided to go with just six atoms instead of the fifteen because we realized that it would be too much money to spend on buying so many more pipes.
Later on, on Wednesday, the rest of us girls went to sculpture lab to see how far the guys have reached in the cutting of the pipes. We also had an indepth conversation with Professor Micheal about all the wiring that needs to be done and drawing a plan of where the wires are going to go. We realized that its a crazy amount of wiring that needs to be done especially in regards to the Fade Candy because it uses 8 pins. It cannot be connected in serial, only 64 NeoPixel lights can be connected to each pin at a time. It is not going to be an easy task, but it is do able. Some pictures are shown below, more can be found in the gallery regarding our progress.
