I’ve built an infrared range finder from an infrared led and phototransistor and I can only get up to like 20 centimeters. Which is fine for me but im trying to change the processing code to reflect this and I can’t figure out how to change the numbers on the grid to go from like 5 centimeters to 20 any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Cody

Tall order! Umm… well I this wold be my logic:

Get image from jMyron
Map/scale the camera image to your Processing screen/document area
Translate the position of the jMyron item to a set of shapes/quads/lines and then produce co-ordinates from these – not sure how many points of reference you want but for example a hand you could split to several items.
Then you pass the x, y and z of each object made from the jMyron to Arduino via the serial port.

That probably makes it sound easier than it is. How precise do the movements need to be? and what do you want to detect – I guess you want to map the movement of a hand to alter the positions of the acid sprayer?

What I would do instead is have a look at this:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/maximum_pc_builds_a_multitouch_surface_computer

And build a kind of touch screen that will detect a users hand/ fingerprints from infrared (can convert the webcam easy enough)

Not quite as fluid as monitoring a users hand but probably easier to achieve (Or not).

Sorry not much use here – not done anything like this yet.

Came across your stuff online and loved it.

I am an artist only beginning to use arduino

You can see examples of my work here-

http://rhyshimsworth.com/work%207.htm

As you can see, I have been making some basic drawing and painting
machines and so far I have been using some very basic software that turns
a PC into a CNC machine, communicating to a driver box and powering
stepper motors.

I am now keen to make the pieces more interactive and am trying to make a
painting machine that will paint according to the movements of the viewer,
using a web cam to monitor the viewer and an arduino micro controller to
move the stepper motors in real time.

I have spoken to a friend of mine who has some experience of arduino who
was able to find some processing code that would turn movements on a web
cam into a drawing on the computer screen-

http://pastie.org/795453

It needs a plugin to be added to processing, from the JMyron site

http://webcamxtra.sourceforge.net/download.shtml

We were thinking that we should be able to tweak this to drive some
stepper motors, at least i hope my friend will be able to. Trouble is he
has little experience of stepper motors. The motors I have are like the
ones here-

http://www.xylotex.com/StepperMotor.htm

I have got the motors kind of working through the arduino, all though they move very slow. I am desperately trying to find some way of translating the processing code for JMyron into x and y coordinates to move the the stepper motors. I have an art exhibition opening next week and have 3 pieces that all rely on this working. I have bitten off more than I can chew so any help you can offer would be amazing!

Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

Rhys

Anyway, not done too much with stepper motors, so apologies if I’m wrong.

Have a look at: http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Stepper?from=Tutorial.Stepper

So first create a stepper motor object – are you using a bipolar stepper? If so I can help you out with the H-bridge/ motor controller chip

If you’ve got all that done and can control the stepper then we just need to calculate the steps per revolution the motor will have – might already be in your tech specs.

If you’ve got that then you should be able to use the Arduino stepper motor libraries and then send number of steps over the serial port?