It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Sorry about that. A lot has been completed. In some sense much of the last month has been spent on bundling up the project for deployment. I’ve built some prototype wearable enclosures and Leo has been helping with scoping out how the vest are going to be assembled. We played around with a few configurations last night and the consensus was that it’s going to be really cool. It should be pretty hard to mess this up now.

I’ve been cleaning up the code quite a bit over the last few weeks. Documentation, robustness, organization, performance, etc. There’s still a lot to do but the framework is now in place to be able to evolve much more quickly. Pattern design can now take a front seat.

• Upper right shows a count of the currently active members in the network. The idea is to click on that triangle and show a detailed list of who’s in the group. I decided to remove the details from the main screen for artistic reasons.
• The center flash button is what I think will be the main interactive command. This causes all strands to do a strobe like effect. I think this will work well with music.
• The circles around the flash button are representations of the members. The size and position of the circle is controlled by the radio signal strength. It works quite well to move the radio away from the controller and watch the circle shrink smoothly. Also, these are animated, orbiting the flash button at a speed depending on their closeness. Like.
• The layout for the rest of the buttons is free form. I’ve refactored the code to be a bit more flexible and it’s just a matter of designing patterns and implementing the details.
• Sliders are a bit enhanced to make it easier to select. On the phone these were really small and difficult to control

I need to upload some video of the interface in action. Also the effect on the fur that Leo found is really nice. It’s almost like you don’t need too many patterns!