Progress!

When I started on the programming for the lights, our professor told me to describe the actions of my program in plain English and translate that into coding. So here is what I want my program to do:

1. The user walks up to the computer. Each main pump is already lit up on screen.

2. The user presses the physical pump to navigate from pump to pump.

3. At each pump, the cholera cases light up one at a time.

4. Once all the cases have lit up, a sound clip starts playing, or it can play over the lights turning on; I haven’t decided yet.

5. The lights stay on until the user moves to the next pump.

6. The program ends at Broad Street.

It took a little while (and a lot of questions), but I figured out how to make all this work in Max. There are settings to turn the main lights on when the program loads; settings to delay the lights so they turn on one after another; settings to link the physical pump (I haven’t made this yet) to the computer; and settings to link the sound clips to the lights. Over the last two classes, I made a basic patch and connected it to the Makey Makey circuit I mentioned in my last post.

Screenshot of max patch

Now that I have a basic patch, I have to repeat this set up for all five of the pumps on the map, so that the lights shine underneath my copy of the map. I hit a stumbling block with figuring out how to turn off the lights when the user moved to the next pump. However, I realized it would actually look better if all the lights stayed on, because it gives the impression of the disease spreading over time.

  

Now that I have the mechanics of the exhibit, I need to work on the content. I have to do some research to find information for the introduction and conclusion that will frame the exhibit. To find editorials for the sound clips, I will go through a British newspaper database and pull interesting articles. Then, I’ll get some of my friends to read them out for me, and upload it to the program. And I still have to make the physical pump for the interface.

Apart from the mechanics of the project, I also learned more about the map. It's a lot smaller then I originally thought. I thought it covered all of London, but its actually only a small section covering a few blocks around the diseased pump, or at least that’s what published.