The other major discovery I made which explained much of the circuit’s random (unintended) behavior was that the two AD5206 chips interfered with one another. I plugged a single LED into each of the twelve outputs (across the two chips) and found that a simple test program didn’t operate properly when both chips were running. As soon as I disconnected the three data lines (CLK, SDI, and CS) from the second chip, the first chip would work properly. I wondered if there might be some sort of “floating” condition when the two chips were used together. Since CLK and SDI were shared, I hypothesized that CS was likely the culprate. To test this, I added 10K pull-down resistors on the chip selects of both chips. It worked! The test program dimmed the lights in the proper sequence rather than skipping around randomly on the third and fourth outputs.

I started out searching for other ITP Spatial Design portfolios and ended up discovering e-Portfolios. I managed to restrain myself before diving headlong into the world of personal content management systems. There is something about information storing, sorting, searching, and organization that grabs my attention. As I was preparing to start classes at ITP I gave my then “old” (meaning several months) wikidpad system a shake for Evernote. I tried out GoBinder, Windows Journal, and most recently OneNote. This has almost been an obsession for me. How do I store the information I collect each day. How do I organize it so I can find it again. How do I display it so others can get a sense of what I’ve been doing?

We had some difficulties on Wednesday afternoon, which stemmed from a bug in Processing’s offscreen drawing code. We are drawing our kaleidoscope images offscreen in order to avoid the overhead of computing the positions of all of the “particles” in our system. By drawing a small particle system offscreen and capturing the bitmap image of it each frame, we can manipulate the bitmap using Processing’s image handling functions and avoid iterating through massive collections of particle objects.

Shawn Van Every came to our assistance and helped me dig through some of the Processing source code in order to locate a potential workaround. He found that by changing the offscreen rendering method from P2D to Java2D, we could safely use the “rect” function which had previously caused Processing to choke.

- Problem: The MAX patch plays two notes simultaneously. We work to debug this issue by breaking the MAX patch into sections… first by printing the received note data, then watching this data as it propagates through successive objects in the patch.