Project Four

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/auxiliary+equipment
http://itsasmallweb.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/mashing-up-daft-punk/
http://www.visualisingdata.com/index.php/2011/05/soundaffects-a-musical-and-visualisation-interpretation-of-nyc/
http://digigen.co.uk/2011/03/17/range-rover-evoque-pulse-of-the-city-campaign-and-film/
http://urbantick.blogspot.com/2010/03/tracks-refreshed-processing.html

So the first thing we did when we got our brief was divvy up the jobs. I ended up being the programmer because I was the only one who had a vague idea of how to program. We then went about brainstorming. We were to come up with a piece of axillary equipment that recorded data and allowed us to see the city in ways we wouldn't be able to otherwise.
My idea was viewing the city the way an animal or insect would. I did three concepts, a spider, a dog and a bird. My group decided to use my Spidercam idea and drew up a sketch. We were going to bisect the image into into eight squares and make the edges black and white and blurry.
I also thought that we might be able to make it turn towards movement it detects in the outer squares but as I was the programmer and I wasn't sure how we'd do that I was hesitant to mention it.
Then talked to Kim and couldn't quite defend our idea so he told us to take pictures of light and colour around the city instead. We decided to keep our original sketch until we talked to Charles and he told us to just to use colour. To make the equipment drive around in a circle, drive forward, then circle again, taking pictures when it circled. We would then take the average colour in the pictures, turn it into a square and put it in another picture.
We got stuck on how to design the equipment. Eventually we settled on a basic design of a box on the car and another box for the camera on top. We had a little trouble with that because our first Deign in CAD was done for aesthetics not practicality. Eventually we got the okay and the fabricators went of to make it while I worked on programming.
I used both Arduino and Max for the programming. Arduino to control the car and a servo that we were going to use to tilt the camera at different angles. Our car was  programmed to drive forward, circle, drive forward etc. Then I discovered that the front wheels were actually on another motor not a servo so I hooked that up to the arduino to be able to change the direction and hooked the back wheels up to a battery pack.
Then we decided it went to fast and swapped it around making it so the car only drove in circles and we could control the speed of the car through the arduino board. Then we discovered the servo to change the angle of the camera didn't work and got rid of that.
The MaxPatch ended up taking the average colour from the live feed and exporting images from it onto another screen every so often in lines. I edited the original patch form James to include two cameras and the final image/movie so that every second picture came from the second camera.