Pascal’s Dots

Description

This project is a collaboration with students from Riverpoint Academy Carl Richardson and Brook Gannon. Carl’s show is entitled, “Nerd” and opens at Marmot Art Space in Spokane Washington on Friday, July 7th and runs through August 1st.

Our task was to create an interactive piece which invites participants to explore patterns in Pascal’s Triangle. Participants press twenty-one, unmarked arcade buttons, presented in a triangle. As they press different buttons they are presented with different quantities, patterns and tones. Participants discover and create as the control the polar spirals.

Table of Contents

• Description
• Installation
• Usage
• Contributing
• Credits
• License

Installation

Fork, Clone or Download this repo. Code has been split across multiple files to make editing and development easier. Some classes are designed to work independently of this particular application. See the Wiki for more details. All code is compatible with Processing 3.3.3 and Minim 2.2.2 (for audio).

A no-audio version is available on: openprocessing.org: Pascal’s Dots - OpenProcessing

Usage

All keys are mapped to lowercase alpha keys on a standard English keyboard. Anna used a Teensy 3.6 to build a custom USB controller which consists of twenty-one arcade buttons arrayed in a triangle. Each button emulates a key on the keyboard in the following layout:

		           a                                                   1
		         b   c                                               1   1
  		       d   e   f                                           1   2   1
 		     g   h   i   j                                       1   3   3   1
 		   k   l   m   n  o                                    1   4   6   4   1
                 p   q   r   s   t  u                                1   5  10   10  5   1

On the left you’ll see the keys and on the right their corresponding positions in Pascal’s Triangle. Each key pressed creates the corresponding quantity of dots on screen in addition to the corresponding note in the scale, with 10 being the 1 in the next octave.

The following keys & combinations create additional behaviors:

• v - switch to random polar curve that acts as path for dots
• w - alternate between white & black background color
• z - create a stream of dot objects from random (x, y) position
• x - select new random background color from mix of given color palette.
• a & b & c - alternate between dots moving to original & stationary positions and dots following selected polar curve.
• a & p & u - clear all dots from screen and remove from memory

Contributing

I'd beyond excited if you'd be interested in contributing to this project. I don't have any guidelines at this point. Just send me a pull request.

Credits

Carl Richardson - Thank you for the invitation to share in your work. I’m honored to be part of your show. Also, I think the orange is growing on me.

Brook Gannon - Thanks for the killer sounds and your patience with my demanding indecision.

Riverpoint Academy Students - Anna, Lexi and Taylor. Thank you for your curiosity, passion and hard work. I’m glad to have had your participation in this project, I can’t wait to see what you do next!

A special thank you to @shiffman for writing Nature of Code Your chapters on Vectors, Particle Systems and Autonomous Agents enabled me to create something with simple rules that creates engaging visuals that feel to me to perfectly balance chaos and predictability. I’m so excited with how it turned out and I’m grateful to you for laying such a beautiful foundation on which I could build.

License

Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-SA 3.0 US)

#nerd #processing #docs