The task for week 6 was to “make a serial application that controls one of the animation projects you’ve done in intro to computational media with analog sensor data from an arduino, sent to the browser serially” so I decided to give my evil peep game I’ve been working on in ICM an external controller.
The evil peep game was relatively easy to adapt for an external controller. Origionally the Evil Peeps would appear at the pointer of the mouse on screen at an increasing rate. The challenge was to continue placing peeps without overlaps even as the time between new peeps and the available space on the screen were shrinking. To adapt it for an external controller I first copied in all of the serial communication set up (listing available ports, error checking, etc…) that was made available to us in the serial communication Lab. Once I got the arduino and the sketch to communicate I added an if statement so that if the peeps game received a signal for a button press from the arduino it would look for all controls to come from that device and ignore the mouse. This allowed the game to be played either the standard way or with the game controller. The next step was to add the controls.
At this point measuring the output of a sensor and mapping it’s values is something I’ve gotten comfortable with so having the arduino read two potentiometers was straightforward. I assembled my arduino with one button input and two potentiometer inputs and stuffed it into a used milk carton.
I programed the arduino to serial write the value of each potentiometer and the button as a series of values, like this: “125,125,0” – This would indicate that both potentiometers are close to half their maximum resistance and that the button is not pressed. In p5 I read these values, split them up, mapped the range in values to the size of the screen, and stored each in an array. Once I had these values coming in reliably having them control the game was just a matter of replacing mouseX and mouseY as the basis for the peep locations with the mapped potentiometer values stored in the array. Controlling the game with the potentiometers made it significantly more difficult so I spent a lot of time adjusting the score and Peep timers until I got it to a playable format. In the end I was really happy with how it turned out and I think I’ve developed a much deeper appreciation for classic arcade games!
Video:
- one issue I had was that after stuffing my arduino in the box the button became unreliable – the solution would have been to get a better button