Thursday, January 23, 2014

Neko 2.2

Hardware

For my needs, the accelerometer and gyroscope gave both too much and too little information. I decided to scrap the locational sensors and use mild trigonometry. Using the ultrasonic sensor as a guide for keeping the brush on the canvas did work quite well, so I might reinstall that. I'm testing out a color sensor, cameras and lights now that the arm is working smoothly.

Software

I'm expanding my text-based approach after reading the wonderful novel Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers. Instead of just looking for color words in texts about art, I want Neko to do freer association on a larger corpus. I'm still going to be selective about the texts I incorporate, but I liked the relationship Powers' narrator had with his machine.

Firmware

This is the firmware that's running in the video. This was just a piece of test code, but I really like the motion it makes. I don't want it to get too rigid and boring, treating the painting as a 2D grid. I want to find the kind of strokes Neko is good at. I'm starting to think of it like a dance: programmed sequences of graceful motion, recombined.
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