Interfaces

For this week, our goal was to program an interface with one of our input or output devices. Honestly, I did not do that, as I spend my time working towards my final project(s) which were just around the corner. I have to admit that I do have a few years of experience with programming and interfaces, so I preferred to split my time otherwise.

I would mention though that throughout the semester, I did work on various interfaces:

• The Apfelstruder App (The AppLE?) from machine week was written mostly by myself. For more details, see the link. But in short it’s a NodeJS app, where the front-end heavily relies on three.js, which I always knew about but never actually used. The communication to the machine is done using a WebSocket, which Brian coded the part which actually talks with Squidworks.
• In Bioprinting week, I wrote a short Python+OpenCV script to fetch videos from a microUSB camera attached to the micro-extruder head.
• I enjoyed helping a few fellow classmates with interfaces for their cool projects. With Nof, we set up a streaming pipeline using GCloud and NodeJS, so anyone can access the live stream of her solar camera, regardless of which Wifi network the camera is connected to. With Joao I helped a tiny bit with an OpenFrameworks C app that generates a super-fast live plot of data coming from any serial device. I actually think this app should be included in the main HTMAA site as other live-plotting methods I experimented with seem to be inherently slower. With Alfonso we tried to do a similar thing but with two simultaneous serial ports, but sadly couldn’t get it in time for the demo day (if we had only one more day…)