The black light was broken during room setup, so we may need to scrap that idea. Today I dressed the tree with some fake leaves and fungus (which is made from spray painted polystyrene balls) and will add some additional flourish before the show if there is time.

A quick update on what we managed to accomplish today. We weren’t planning on doing any work, but Nicky offered to help show us how to set up the projectors when I went to ask for keys this weekend and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to get started so we’re less rushed next week.

What we now have is:

– Black curtains that meet in the middle, and that can be easily moved. The room is sectioned off in the way we discussed in class.

– A white curtain velcroed to the rig that we can project a scene of a forest onto for the exhibition using a PC that has been checked out to us.

– three projectors for the forest scene

-one projector for Alex

– we have also hung 6 spotlights (that are not currently connected to power)

All of this can be rearranged as needed, and we will need a forest scene to project (can be the same across three displays), and some environmental audio.

It’s painted! When it dries, we’ll remove the masking tape over the aluminum foil contact points and test to make sure the inputs are still registering.

Once this is done, we will consider our options for lighting (elwire vs NeoPixels) and in the future add detail paint with brushes.

Input Map

As the cables got longer, I found that I needed to include little bunches of aluminum foil at the end of the jumper wire (and under the aluminum foil tape) to make sure that capacitive sensor readings were above the needed threshold.

We now have 12 labeled inputs (with matching wires) that we can connect to the program Billy has written during class tomorrow.

While I was unable to get the Raspberry Pi to communicate with the Bluefruit nRF52 board over a Bluetooth serial communication (it appears to require further research in the Nordic SDK to get functioning) – it was a very good lesson for navigating low level hardware and basic Python scripting that I hope to apply to the rest of this project.

Today in class I was able to get the system up and running headless over SSH with a portable battery. After speaking with Matt, I learned that it may be best to just use the GPIO pins not being used by the Capacitive touch Hat to control the lights.

The next task will be to get the script running with sound and light (using LEDs) happening when a sensor is touched. Once we’ve got that working we can start implementing both on a small scale tree model.

6:28 PM