Starting with morning coffee on the terrace and a slow burning cig in the sunshine. Thoughts were brimming, the motivation palpable. Sure, we were chilling before the real task of the day but this moment of concentration was needed. It's like an athlete on his way to the stadium, music in ears, a serious glare. SAM has a body, a memory and an arm. Yeah! It seemed quite logical then to give SAM a pen and send it some superscripted instructions. The feeding of bytes, the highs and lows in the world of Arduino, were transformed magically into motor energy and then, before our gaping eyes, we witnessed SAM draw its first masterpiece. Proudly photographed we were ready to send it to the V&A museum for consideration. We decided on making a website instead. At least until we get a reply from the art experts. The randomness in the image is due to a number of unforetold factors beyond the mental scope of the SPAM team. Trial and error is your best bet here although we would like to share some goodies both technically and spiritually.

First Drawing - Team SPAM - 2014

It’s all about how you frame it mate !

What frame of mind are you in today SAM? Crickey, looks like you are tripping buddy, what’s the score? All those odd looking abstract squiggles on the page were in fact an attempt to get SAM to draw a simple repetition of form. In this case, we had chosen our stoic idol, the square. So what happened? Well basically our dear machine had no idea about the surface dimensions on which we intended it to express itself. Furthermore, to add to the Pollocking overdose problem, SAM went into physical seizure, roughly around 3.43pm and did so on various occasions. Time for a cig break.

Right, problema numero uno. Determining the drawing zone for our little drawing fella was something we hadn’t considered. Again, it seemed over eagerness got the better of us. Now this is no laughing matter because driving ya motas into overdrive will eventually harm them. They cackle out their sufferance and if you don’t have an emergency ‘quit’ button, all there is left to do is enforce the bastard brutal maneuver. That translates as pulling the plug basically and sending SAM into a coma. Understandably, not a nice way to go.

Our First Prototype - Team SPAM - 2014

So to help the little guys know when they're at the extremities of our wooden frame, we tell em to stop. We could use endstops for these - little on/off switches that give physical feed back to the Arduino and are often found on 3D printers. However, delving into this solution at this stage didn't seem appropriate. It would only add to our brain ache. Another solution was simply to let SAM know about the boundaires by determining a set of constraining values in our code for the x and y axis. Not exaclty the most elegant solution but to get us up and drawing, it was a feasable one. By the way, we'll be publishing all the code as it is developed over at the hub of Gits, so keep tuned. We'll be adding no doubt a link on the home page.

Problema numero due. This one was slightly more tricky. Why was SAM tripping out? The answer came in imagining our little geezer on acid. (Don’t do that at home kids, ok!). When on a bad trip, you need to slow things down a little. In the world of code, that could be many things but we thought that if we added a little delay between instructions, then perhaps SAM would have a little more time to get used to the lightening speed of information bombarding this poor little geezer’s brain. We entered the trail and error dub delay observation room and slowly counted the number of squares SAM managed to draw correctly before spinning out. To test the theory, we increased the delay and counted again. To our relief, we made a conclusive conclusion, conclusively more conclusively convincing than we thought could conclusively be concluded. Er, sorry, Victor nudeged the dub delay millsecond dial a little too far on that one. So yeah, SAM was not a happy tripper for an afternoon but Jah Almighty brought us the light.

Memory Testing - Team SPAM - 2014

What have we learned ?

When sending instructions to SAM it needs some time to reflect. More precisely, he suffers from short-term memory loss. To solve this we increased our delay time after each instruction is sent from Processing to Mr.'Ard. We don't really know the specifics of this. Our Arduino is a bit of a mystery for the mo.