This week assignement was to write an application that interfaces with an input and/or output device
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"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods -
This week was actually my last week, i did this assignent after i finished all the others, but i started on the right week the problem is that i don't think i had the capacity to make what i wanted to make, and now i got close but not there yet.
I started this week looking at my input devices so i could choose one to output to an application (in processing), and i choose the SD reader for two reasons: One it gave me a lot of controled information fast (because the text is a fixed variable) and Two because i had downloaded Thoreau's Walden from the internet to my Kindle and thought that the idea of trying to create and image from text is something intersting. I first saw this idea on the internet, don't remember where, but is the idea that if you can decode an image to binary and a sound for example you could in theory convert wherever is the imput to the output, so you can take a sound and make it into and image, or a video or even a text and that is true for the oposite, of course some translation algorithim is nedded and the final product normally is not as pleasent as the original, but it raises the question, if you can translate everything in binary and make anything into anything is there a code for beauty? Maybe to much filosofical, but this was the initial idea.
There is also the idea of the first class Neil gave us (link), if you could tranform objects into the minimal part of it, digitalize them, you could create anything from anything in the fisical world. In the end creating the Replicator from Star Trek. But even if the idea is there this project is to rudimentary and it's just something i could try to code in Processing language.
To begin i started using the SPS Master board with the SD reader/writer module, then i used Arduino IDE example code SD/filedump and modified to use on the Board, mainly I changed chipSelect to pin3 (PD3) and atached the SoftwareSerial Library. Then i transformed the e-book text to a .TXT file named Walden and made the computer read the file thru the FTDI cable via the Arduino IDE Serial Monitor.
Then i made a code in Processing using the "Stub" code Shawn send us, and modified with his help to read each character from the text file to make each one a pixel or a square from a diferent shade of gray, to create and image. In the future i whant to create a colorful image, but processing uses RGB or HSB to make a color that means 16million RGB colors and HSB (a lot depending of 8 or 16bit) and i just have 127 values for the characters i'm using (ASCII). So in the future i have to make an array to codify the 16million colors into 127 values.
127 Characters
Walden in grey scale and 10pixels apart
Walden in grey scale and a grid of one pixel