petebooth[iaac]

During the week between 3rd term and the thesis project the guys from smaq held a workshop at IaaC as part of our studies. The focus of the week long workshop was ‘water and its usage’. We were asked to investigate different scales of water usage and develop a system and prototype that matched the case study. All of this with 80m of 8mm clear pipe, connectors and zip ties. The results can be seen below, and you can download a copy of the presentation here.

The dome project is now officially complete, with the presentation done and dusted.  Haven’t got much to say about it at the moment, but will try and put something together in the next few weeks - provided that my thesis doesn’t get in the way.

I’ve been a bit slow on the blogs lately, mainly as our studio class has been busily laser cutting and constructing the Dome project. To fill you in on the details:

• the design is fully modeled within TopSolid, allowing for a completely linked design to fabrication process.
• constructed entirely of cardboard and zip ties
• is approximately 3.m wide and 1.8m high
• contains approximately 1050 individual triangular sections, all deferent (ie they only fit in one place)
• has embedded lighting and circuitry, allowing the dome to sense presence and occupation, and react accordingly
• took about 4 days of 24 work for the class to construct.

It has been a very enjoyable and rewarding project, thus far, and we still ahve the finishing touches to apply to it. I’ll post more once it is complete.

The paper that Ben and I have written as a part of the Neil Leach seminar, Architectural Theory, is complete.

You can download a copy of it here

The final assignment has been submitted for scripting.II. In terms of creating a live link between physical information and the rhino3d environment the project has been a complete success. The circuit records light levels to a text file through ardunio and processing, which is read into rhino3d. This data is then used to populate a surface with spheres and points in a random fashion.

Given more time the script would have developed more on the rhino3d side of things. With a fair amount of extra work I was intending to turn it in to a packing exploration, arranging the spheres according to their realation to other surrounding elements.

download the scripts and base files here
download the final presentation here
view a movie of the script in action on youtube here

Moving right along form the last post, I have now combined the data read script as a function into a new script that actually does something remotely interesting! The script reads the data, stores it in an arra and then uses this data to propagate a surface with the specific number of random points. It continues through the dataset, propagating each value of points on a new layer, so eventually it will create a file that has a base surface, with x number of layers, each with a unique number of points in a different color.

It isn’t very intelligent yet, as it tends to put a lot of values near the edges of the surface, but with a bit of proximity detection it should be able to scatter the points more evenly. Hopefully this script will evolve into a packing script of some description. That is the ultimate aim, but i’ve already achieved the most important part of (semi)live data transfer to the rhino environment.

download the script here

After a lot of trial and error, I have finally completed the rhino script function that reads the txt file from processing. As the examples given were all concerning excel files, a lot of further research has been undertaken in order to get to even this basic stage.

The script opens the txt file selected by the user, reads the data until the end of the line (one value), determines if the string is <= 3 characters, and if successful converts the value to an integer and stores it in an array. Anything larger than a 3 digit value is discarded as processing has a tendency to output weird numbers, particularly in the first few entries of each file (creates either a ‘null’ or a very long number).

The next step is to use this data to actually achieve something!

download the script here

Well it’s not completely true, the bulk of it is finished but if I get time there will be some adjustment later on. For now it is done.

download the scripts here

I continued to pursue the live link from the dsLib, but after a couple of emails from the man himself, it is apparent that there are a few technical problems that I am unable to overcome. So taking that into account, I am now going for a semi-live link.

The code for the arduino circuit has been updated to allow for a better delay time between sensor reads. This script is written in arduino/C++, but as it is a fairly simple and well documented operation is was quite easy to get it working properly. Unfortunately the arduino language doesn’t support export to a text based file natively (to my knowledge), so I have used processing as an in between interface for this task.

The processing script (also based on C++) establishes a connection with the serial port, reads the data flowing through it and when it has received 40 sets of data, dumps it to a csv text file that can be read by rhino. This script will hopefully evolve a little more to create multiple csv files, allowing for rhino to bed fed data in a stream like manner. At the moment it will overwrite the file each time.

The final script I have been working on is the beginnings of the rhino side of things. Presently I have created an endless loop that prints the rhino build information continuously until the snap control is turned on. It create a graceful way for the loop to end. This is going to be built upon to allow rhino to read the csv files and do something with it. At this stage I am aiming for rhino to create a series of objects and ‘animate’ them based on the input data.
Hopefully all goes well.

Now thatI have the arduino board and script working properly, the time has come to tackle the rhino script to open connection with the serial port. As previously posted, vbscript and rhinoscript has no builtin functionality to access this information. The additional vbscript functionality is made possible by Stylianos Dritsas, who has completed some work in this area previously.

It is a case of downloading the additional library, and installing them on the computer, although this proved to be a little harder than first though, needing things to be added to the system registory and a script loaded in rhino. After a lot of fiddeling around, it seems to be setup correctly.

With the limited help files on the support page for the libraries, I have written a script that in theory should allow rhino to read values from the serial port, and print them on screen (once per script at this stage). With all of the scripting errors now elimated it is returning a value, but it is always the number 1. I think there could be a problem with arduino sending the data correctly to the live port or, more likely, my script isn’t addressing the port correctly.

download the script here

The first part of my physical sensing link to rhino is the creation of the circuit and the beginnings of the arduino script. For the initial testing a simple circuit has been created using the arduino diecimila in conjunction with a bead board. At this stage the circuit has a light sensor and a LED.

The arduino script that powers the circuit is also relatively simple at this stage. It takes light readings from the light sensor, and turns the LED on in low light conditions and off when the opposite occurs. The script contains a threshold value that can be set between 0 and 1024 (the range of the light sensor) to allow for fine tuning in different light conditions. The magic starts to happen when the script outputs the sensor data to the serial port, allowing other application to access the data.

you can download the script here

At this stage the circuit and script are working correctly, and the next stage will be to create an open communications link between it and rhino. The additional vbscript commands that will allow this to happen are provided by Stylianos Dritsas, who has completed some work in this area previously. Hopefully I can get this up and running soon, as it is fairly pivotal for my project.