Light painting with the robotic arm caught our attention at the beginning of the course. We are fascinated by the glowing effect of light patterns synced with sound effects and this is what we are trying to produce for our final project. At this stage, we are investigating how to move the robotic arm on a vector path. For example, how to draw a rectangle in Processing. The rest () function draws the rectangle completely and renders it at once but we are trying to figure out how to draw one point at a time. We are expecting to find some approaches in which we can output one point of any pattern at a time. For example, in the image below the point is moving on a path outputting an x-value a frame per second. In order to publish the x and y values of a moving point to the robotic arm we need xy coordinates at each frame. The provided code that sends x and y values on each click is help full but we might change it to mouse move to control arm movement freely.

Another approach is to feed Sin() values to the arm to move it on a smooth path.

What you learned

• The moveL function of the robotic arm is not suitable for smooth uninterrupted motion.
• mousemoved() is our best bet at this point since we were unable to find a solution to output individual coordinates values of each point in a rectangle or any vector path.

Process work

The first step is to make the room completely dark, we place black cardboard panels on all windows and a black backdrop.

Some Text runs