[live web week 6] midterm: swap chat

Try Swap Chat here.

For my midterm, I made a chat room that takes a picture of somebody else in the room whenever you submit a message. I built it off of the Face Chat from the other week.

One of the first things I added was a thing to tell you how many other people are currently in the room. I kept track of the client count in a variable in the server-side code, and added to it every time a new person joined the room. Once they disconnected, I removed a number, and I sent this updating number over to the client-side, which shows it on the page.

In order to take a picture of a different person in the room, I made an array of all the clients’ socket IDs, and added someone’s ID once they joined, and then removed them once they left.

I knew I had to pick a random ID from the ID array in order to take a picture of that person, but I didn’t want the user getting themselves, so I made another array called notMe[] of all the IDs in the room except for the user’s own ID on the client side. Then sending a message looked like this:

function sendmessage(message, randoPicked) {
//pick a random person each time
randoPicked = notMe[Math.floor(Math.random() * notMe.length)];
socket.emit(‘chatmessage’, message, randoPicked);
}

From there, I executed the picture-taking code, and added that photo to the text that the original user sent.

There were a couple other extra things I added in order to make the chat experience a little better, like the floating text box, and the auto-scrolling to the bottom of the page once new data is added.

There are still a lot of CSS related things I’d want to change so that it looks better, but getting all my divs lined up properly is a task beyond me right now. I also want to add something that prevents people who don’t allow a camera on the page to not be able to access the content.

I’ve only tested it myself with two cameras, so we’ll see what happens once more users try it……

See Swap Chat here.
https://gist.github.com/nicolehe/7e1851098f751d7a1609.js

[pcomp week 6] Allergic to Love, Joystick Version (serial communication)

I ran into a lot of problems this week!

While doing this week’s labs on serial communication, lots of weird things kept happening — it would work sometimes and not other times, my computer crashed, Arduino couldn’t find the right port…

A few hours in, I realized that 95% of my problems were because I kept forgetting to turn on and off the serial monitor in P5. Even when I realized this I would forget to do it, or do it in the wrong order. This was very irritating.

Eventually, I got it sorted out. In the labs, it was suggested that we wire up one button and two potentiometers. Luckily for me, the joystick that I got for this assignment was literally those three things in one, so once I figured out the code on the Arduino side, I could easily move it into my p5 sketch.

The sketch I decided to add a sensor to was a game I made the other week in ICM, Allergic to Love. In the original version, you use your mouse to move your character along the x-axis, and then clicked to shoot your laser. Using a joystick to replace the mouse was fairly straightforward. The pot in the joystick that controls x-axis movement would replace mouseX, and the button on the joystick would replace mousePressed.

(This joystick also allows you to control movement on the y-axis, and even though this particular game doesn’t require it, I decided to keep that code in just in case in the future I decide to add some kind of movement up and down.)

Like in the lab, I made an array of data in P5 for the 3 sensor inputs: x, y, and button press. The P5 code using the sensor data ended up looking like this:

function serialEvent() {
  // read a string from the serial port
  // until you get carriage return and newline:
  var inString = serial.readStringUntil('rn');
 
  //check to see that there's actually a string there:
  if (inString.length > 0 ) {
    var sensors = split(inString, ',');            // split the string on the commas
    if (sensors.length > 2) {                      // if there are three elements
      if (sensors[0] == 539) { 
          cannon.dir = 0
      } else if (sensors[0] < 200) {
          cannon.dir = -1
      } else if (sensors[0] > 900) {
          cannon.dir = 1
      }
      buttonPress = sensors[2];      // element 2 is the button
    }
  }
}

You can see how I made sensors[0], the x-axis, change direction depending on input, and how I set sensors[2], the button, to a simple variable.

It’s pretty fun to play the game with a joystick. It definitely makes it feel more arcade-y. Even though I had to make it a bit easier to accommodate the joystick, it’s still pretty hard!

My P5 code and my Arduino code are below.