Beyond Type #1

Why did I do this?

Initially I sourced the AVRTouch shield, because it comes with an Omnivision camera. It is able to redirect the image datastream directly to the lcd screen, but processing any of that image data turned out to be nearly impossible, because the image is way too big for the small memory unit on the Atmega32. It might be possible to read the data back from the ILIxxxx LCD driver chip registers, but i never tested that idea. However, to be able to test program variations, I found some sort of user input useful and implemented a touch screen driver. During this implementation, I also added some graphics features to explore the medium further.

Medium properties

The Hardware that was used is called AVRTouch Version 2.1 and was developed by Guanfu Wang. The PCB hosts an Atmel32 MPU, 320x240 LCD Touch Screen, a Micro SD-Card Slot and a attachable Omnivision CMOS camera. The Eclipse Cpp IDE was used to compile and uploading over the serial line. The touch driver was not included, so I had to program one. The "Beyond Type #1" demo does not make extensive use of the touch option, but in the following video you will see some quick pen moves. Basically a touch is used to reset the drawing.

Results

The graphics in the video were created under a type mismatch a.k.a buffer overflow, which is an interesting fact when we review the exploration as a design process. Mistakes or vague strokes in a hand drawn sketch often lead to new ideas in design. The ambiguity of pencil lines in the reflection in action process help the designer to evolve and explore possible solutions. In Computer Science such vague states orten result in non workable code or it is much to time intensive to explore a medium in a designerly way. Parametric design or generative Algorithms might be an otion, but may demand a bit to much from a small MPU like the Atmega32. However, this explorations shows, that mistakes can produce aesthetic results. The piece is visually interesting, because it bends the moving lines, exploiting optical tricks.