My boyfriend Victor showed me this cartoon once and I thought it was funny, but I didn't quite get it. Last week, when he was listening to me trying to program my Flora for a few hours in a row, he showed it again. This time I got it. This is exactly how it works! Although the Hurray!!!!-part doesn't last for ten minutes.. And the depressing-puzzle-part lasts for about two hours.. Frustrating! And the weirdest part is: I'm still having fun!
Struggling with colors
I made quite some progress last week. And I'm pretty happy with the results so far. What you see in the pictures below is my (seemingly never-ending) struggle to try and make sure the colors picked up by the colorsensor are close enough to be recognised when they show up in the pixels.
When first I tried to make this work, the colors were all off. Green was yellow, blue was orange.. weird! In the Google+hangout, Becky came up with the idea of having the colorsensor take multiple readings and then taking the average as the color. It worked, it made the colors more similar to the color of the different objects I used, but still.. not close enough. In the pictures below you can see the difference.
If you could ignore the green pixel, it's a preprogrammed color for one of the pixels that eventually gets a random color. Yeah yeah, it's on my to-do-list!
In every picture the pixel on the left shows the color after taking 5 measurements and then picking the average. It's not very bright as you can see.
And then every picture has one pixel that's bright and has a color similar to the Legobrick next to it. Hurray! This is the fruit of hard work and a lot of nights of trial and error!
What we did: take the average of 5 measurements, convert it to HSV, pump up the saturation to maximum and convert back to RGB. Victor found the converter on: www.stackoverflow.com. We came up with the idea of HSV when we were thinking about a way to pick 'random' colors that aren't too much like the original color (the one the sensor picked up) and each other (you can read about this here). And when we were thinking of ways to make the colors brighter, this is what we came up with.
The colors aren't perfect, but they're certainly better than they were! We're still experimenting with the dark colors and white, those are the toughest!
Game mode on!
Aside from playing with the colors from the color sensor, I also had a bit of fun coming up with ideas for the actual game! It had to involve at least some colors of course 
First I made sure that the buttons made from conductive fabric worked. And I must say they work excellent! It's such fun to include those in my project! And real easy too. So the game works.. You can touch the button that corresponds with the same color as the viewfinder pixel and you'll see a very nice green 4-pixel-lightshow (I had so much fun writing the code for this bit, it's so nice to know what you're doing and immediately see it in the pixels!). If you'd touch one of the other buttons, you'd see 4 red pixels. I asked my 5 year-old to play the game and this is what happened when he touched the wrong button! He also got it right, but I'll have to make a video to show you later on.
On sewing
I've also sewn together my actual camera. This is familiar territory, so it went pretty smooth. All soft foam and wool felt and a bit of wood too I used the wood to keep some buttons in place, so the kids can push the button and it won't dissappear in the foam.
I won't spoil the fun by showing the entire camera to you guys now. But I'll allow a small sneek-peak 
And yes, of course I'll show you the whole thing at the end of the challenge!
Thanks for reading! Any comments and/or suggestions are welcome as always!
Linda
Top Comments