Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot

By : Nikolaus Gradwohl
Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot

By: Nikolaus Gradwohl

Overview of this book

Processing makes it convenient for developers, artists, and designers to create their own projects easily and efficiently. Processing offers you a platform for expressing your ideas and engaging audiences in new ways. This book teaches you everything you need to know to explore new frontiers in animation and interactivity with the help of Processing."Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot' will present you with nine exciting projects that will take you beyond the basics and show you how you can make your programs see, hear, and even feel! With these projects, you will also learn how to build your own hardware controllers and integrate devices such as a Kinect senor board in your Processing sketches.Processing is an exciting programming environment for programmers and visual artists alike that makes it easier to create interactive programs.Through nine complete projects, "Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot' will help you explore the exciting possibilities that this open source language provides. The topics we will cover range from creating robot - actors performing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", to generating objects for 3D printing, and you will learn how to run your processing sketches nearly anywhere from a desktop computer to a browser or a mobile device.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Building robots


Now we are ready for the final task of our Romeo and Juliet project. We will take some cardboard boxes, Styrofoam spheres, and a pair of cheap speakers or headphones and turn them into our robot-actors.

The robots described in this section are just my version. If you like, you can build them to be completely different and as complex or as simple as you want.

Prepare for Lift Off

To build our robots, we need some materials and tools, which should not be too hard to find. I used the following for my robot-actors:

  • Two cardboard boxes for the bodies

  • Two Styrofoam spheres for the heads

  • A pair of cheap speakers or headphones

  • Googly eyes

  • Acrylic paint

  • Marker pens

  • Needles

  • A hot glue gun

The following picture shows the main materials I used for my robots:

Engage Thrusters

Let's build some robots:

  1. Disassemble your speakers and try to get rid of the body. We only need the speakers, but make sure you don't remove or destroy the cables.

  2. Cut a hole into your cardboard boxes where the speakers should go. Make the holes a bit smaller than the speakers, as shown in the following picture, because we need to glue them to the box later:

  3. Paint your cardboard boxes. I made one white and the other green.

  4. While the boxes are drying, paint some hair on the heads like in the following picture. I made Romeo-Robot's hair black and Juliet-Robot's hair brown.

  5. After the paint has dried, fix the speakers to the cardboard box using some hot glue, as shown in the following picture. Make sure you don't get any glue on the membrane of your speakers.

  6. Now use some markers to draw a face for the robots. You can see the faces of my robots in the following picture:

  7. Use a needle to attach the heads to the bodies of the robots.

  8. Now connect your robot-actors to your sound card and place Juliet on a balcony (for example an empty shoe-box) and make them act.

Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing

In this task, we completed our robot-actors by building bodies for them. We used some cardboard boxes, painted them, and added a cheap pair of speakers by gluing them into the boxes. Each robot got a head made of a painted Styrofoam sphere.

As I already said in the introduction to this task, there is no right or wrong way to build your robots. Build them as small or as big as you like. Add some hair, make them a nose, sew a dress for Juliet, draw Romeo a mustache, and so on.