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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Electronics,  Serial Library › processing, wiring, arduino which to use
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processing, wiring, arduino? which to use? (Read 1760 times)
Patrick
processing, wiring, arduino? which to use?
Dec 4th, 2005, 2:30am  
hello there Smiley

i'm a student of visual communications at the university in offenbach, germany and i'd like to realize a project that involves some – at least to me – complex visual and tangible computing. it's consists of a room that hosts a couple of interactive projections and maybe some objects, all of them react to parameters such as temperature, amount of people in a room, distance of people to objects, visible dominant colours (like a lot of ppl wearing the same colour) via video frame analysis, level of noise. also, there shall be looped music manipulated by some of these parameters.

i'm very new to computing in this area but, though i have a good technical understanding, have neither programming experience nor knowledge apart from teenage experiences in BASIC and low-level skills in flash actionscript. processing seems like the way to go, as other means like VVVV are beyond me … i'm on a mac.

what i couldn't figure out yet is the approach to it. i've read a bit into processing and tried out examples that could be downloaded. for sure there has to be an I/O board like arduino or wiring, but the main question for now is, which is best suited for the tasks given, considering my almost total lack of knowledge (here)? which environment do i have to deal with, using any of both I/O boards? do i have to use processing along with arduino/wiring? if processing is the software-based center on this, does it support two independent video projections from ie. one mac powerbook, running a program that feeds two screens?

any help and hints are appreciated, and if these questions have been answered a thousand times already, mea culpa … Wink

patrick
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nick
Re: processing, wiring, arduino? which to use?
Reply #1 - Dec 4th, 2005, 7:31pm  
The main choice between arduino and wiring is the number of inputs they can handle at once. You need to work out how many digital (on off switches) inputs you will need, and how many analogue (varying signals) you think you will need. This may clarify things.

Each board has a programming enviroment very similar to processing that downloads code onto the board to specify how it respond to the signals it recieves and what message it should send back to the computer. These messages are then used by any program you want to that will hook up to the serial port that they use to communicate.

HTH

Nick
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Patrick
Re: processing, wiring, arduino? which to use?
Reply #2 - Dec 4th, 2005, 11:04pm  
thanks nick, your answer shed light to the main question! considering future projects, i guess it's a good choice to go for wiring, offering more than enough potential for this project.

Smiley patrick
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nick
Re: processing, wiring, arduino? which to use?
Reply #3 - Dec 5th, 2005, 1:15pm  
or - use arduino for this one to get a hang of things (you can use a bare chip on breadboard at very low cost) as if you want to buy one it will be much cheaper to get hold of as you are in Germany (arduino is european based).

if you use wiring for a bigger project later then the code from one will translate very easily to the other.
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