For our video Readymade, I got struck with inspiration one day and came up with the idea of a magic gif ball. A hacked magic 8 ball with a screen in place of the opening so that when you shake it it responds with a gif.

Simple right? WRONG.

First, I wanted to get a feel of how the data flow was going to go. I decided to build my sketch on Max and have the program work through OSC using the accelerometer on my phone.

After I got that working on the actual physical computing. The Arduino doesn’t have the capabilities to play videos, so I quickly had to figure out my options in order to make my project work in a compact way (if not, max would’ve been an easy way to go). The Raspberry Pi rose to the top of the pile, as it has a GPU that can run movies files without a problem.
I also explored the idea of using a teeny controller but you have to convert files to code and run them in the program like that. If that’s the case, I would’ve just used an Arduino.

After doing a bunch of research and solidifying Raspberry Pi as my best option, I went to work. Since the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a analog to digital converter, I have to put it together since my main source of data input is an accelerometer. Step 1, get the Pi and install Rasbian on it.

I found this great schematic online that had exactly how to wire an accelerometer, a MCP3008 and a Pi together. It was in Spanish, so it was interesting to see my ITP world translated into my mother tongue.

I messed around with this for a while and tried for 2 days to make it work, to no avail. I decided then to g back to use the Arduino to read the accelerometer and then use serial communication to send the data to the Pi. We’ll see how that goes!

To be continued…