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skotchvail / Love-Potion-Camp

Code related to the Burning Man camp called "Love Potion"
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Love-Potion-Camp

Tranceporter II Code related to the Burning Man camp called Love Potion.

Tranceporter II is an amazing art car with thousands of LED's that display beautiful animations timed to music.

Processing

The display code runs in a Java-based programming environment called "Processing". Each animation is called a "Sketch". To install Processing on your computer, get the latest version here. Note that you will need at least version 2.0.

Test that you can run one of the sample Sketches that comes with Processing.

Libraries

You will need to install some Java Libraries that the code depends on. The libraries should go in your "sketchbook" folder. The path can be found in Processing preferences. My path looks like this: 

/Volumes/Data/skotchvail/Documents/Processing/Libraries

Get the libraries here and move them into your Libraries folder. Ask Skotch for box permission if needed.

If you are not going to drive the LED's

If you are going to drive the LED's, then skip this section.

Life is easier if you don't have to install the TotalControl drivers. If that is your case, you will need to modify some code to get everything to run. Go to TotalControlConsumer.PDE and comment out the import line like this:

 // import TotalControl.*;

Next rename the class TotalControlFake so that it looks like this:

 static class TotalControl

That should be enough to bypass the driver. Be sure that you do not checkin these changes. They are only to allow your system to run with a partial install.

Skip the next section and go to "Test and Run"

Setup to drive the LED's

Using the hardware depends on an interface library that in turn depends on the D2XX library. If you are not going to be driving the hardware, but just want to use the simulation, then you don't need to do this.

Download the latest D2XX library drivers.

Use the following steps to install on your OS X (these assume you have copied the D2XX directory to your desktop):

  1. Open a Terminal window (Finder->Go->Utilities->Terminal).
  2. If the /usr/local/lib directory does not exist, create it
    sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib
  3. if the /usr/local/include directory does not exist, create it
    sudo mkdir /usr/local/include
  4. Copy the dylib file to /usr/local/lib
    sudo cp ~/Desktop/D2XX/bin/10.5-10.7/libftd2xx.1.2.2.dylib /usr/local/lib/
  5. Make a symbolic link
    sudo ln -sf /usr/local/lib/libftd2xx.1.2.2.dylib /usr/local/lib/libftd2xx.dylib
  6. Copy the D2XX include file
    sudo cp ~/Desktop/D2XX/Samples/ftd2xx.h /usr/local/include/
  7. Copy the WinTypes include file
    sudo cp ~/Desktop/D2XX/Samples/WinTypes.h /usr/local/include/
  8. You have now successfully installed the D2XX library.

Make the PaintYourDragon stuff: 

$ git clone git://github.com/PaintYourDragon/p9813.git

On Skotch's Mac, he had to modify the two Makefile's (p9813/Makefile and p9813/Processing/Makefile) to use CC = llvm-gcc-4.2 but only try this if you are getting compile or link errors.

If that doesn't fix things, you might want to try the older instructions tried to use a patch found in the parent dir of Love-Potion-Camp checkout: $ patch -p0 < ../Love-Potion-Camp/patch.txt

In any event, you need to run both Makefiles from the command line. 

$ cd p9813
$ sudo cp p9813.h /usr/local/include/
$ make clean && make
$ cd processing ; make clean && make && make install

An unfortunate artifact of the Mac and Linux versions of the FTDI driver is that the "Virtual COM Port" kernel extension must be disabled before the p9813 library can be used. Applications such as Arduino depend on the serial port for programming and communication, so these cannot be used at the same time.

Be sure to run

$ make unload

in the p9813 directory before running our app if you have the FTDIUSBSerialDriver installed. When you are done, don't forget to run make load or your other other serial communication such as Arduino programming will not work.

Test and Run

That should be enough to get the simulation to run on your computer. You should be able to load and run TranceporterIIProcessing.pde. You will see an image of the bottle and some animations.

If you get a UnsatisfiedLinkError, try running processing in 32 bit mode to see if it works.

Adding Sketches

See the document ImportingSketches.md for info on how to add Sketches to the system.

Code notes

Processing has a frame buffer. We can read the pixels from that frame buffer and then send them to the LED "Total Control" code.