As I always built a board for the Input Devices assignment, I choose to spend time with programming.
My skills about programming are so pathetic,
it will be an opportunity to develop this point.
To begin, I made a little diagram to explain my final project:
The Smartmachinery will be placed on the ceiling, maybe 10 meters height or more, that's why I need a wireless connection to program the movements (CUES).
I understood that programming an IOS Application was very complicated, so I will
use OSCtouch to send midi with my smartphone.
TouchOSC, it is a very intersting software, it is a midi bridge, and multi platforms.
Touch OSC is not open source but 5$ is cheap for a very useful application.
I downloaded Touch OSC on my Iphone, and Touch OSC editor on my Mac.
This is an example of what the TouchOSC control surface view looks like:
All of the control elements you see on this page can be arranged and configured freely using the TouchOSC Editor application, and the layout of this part will probably be very different depending on which TouchOSC layout you decide to load.
However, at the very top there are some controls that do stay somewhat the same no matter what layout you have loaded, so let's focus on them:
Most space is being used to display one or more larger, rounded rectangular buttons, one of which is always highlighted.
This is TouchOSC's Tab-bar and it allows you to switch between the different pages a layout may provide.
The number of these buttons depends on how many pages a layout has, but there is always at least one.
To the right of the Tab-bar there's two small indicators. These indicate that OSC or MIDI messages are being sent (the upper indicator, green) or received (the lower indicator, red).
To the right of these two indicators there's one button labelled with an i symbol, which takes you back to TouchOSC's main configuration screen.
Set up is very easy: just have to open the audio and midi set-up and double click on " Network", a second page appears.
To start, I just tried to change simple value in Pure data with my phone.
to be continued...
A few days later, after many hours fighting with the Bluetooth shield HC06, and after some research on the web,
I began to understand : this shield will never work with my Iphone...
I found some Bluetooth shields that support the following protocols: BCSP, DUN, LAN, GAP SDP, RFCOMM, and L2CAP
but time delivery is very long, price is high...
A BLE shield is what I should use:
I have to change my plans, an Android device is available in the fab: Let's go !
I spent time to search for a good way to make my android application, Marylin (our Fab Manager) made a very good suggestion: MIT App Inventor2.
The application is nice, even if i don't like the design ;-)
Here's the first page I made:
Two links, one to my finalprojet website, the other one to my presentation video.
The third button open the application.
The second page, allows to connect or disconnect Bluetooth, send user to record a CUE or to Execute a the show.
At this step, I discovered the first (of many..?) bug on App Inventor 2: two buttons disappeared, however they are present on the android device, but the preview is not correct.
The third page is the setup page, 3 sliders to set the move parameters, a GO, a GO to Zero, and an Emergency STOP button for safety.
There's also a link to cue 2, a HOME button to return to the main page.
The most complicated part was to find a solution about multi screen and Bluetooth connection, Gégé ( student /277) helped me to find a very effective way to resolve this issue.
We created a variable, initialized this variable with the address of the HC06, and made an "Auto connection" at the beginning of each page.
It works !!
And the "SHOW" page, wich gather all the different CUES:
MIT App inventor is a real good way to create easily your own application but some operations are very complicated :
Copying a screen is really a chore...
