design computation - call 04/2012 - digital realities

RHINO IN REALITY: CONNECTING

DESIGN TO THE REAL WORLD

Physical World Digital World

MAKING A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE DIGITAL & PHYSICAL

Capturing Data Storing Data

Overview of Arduino Hardware

C++ based programming environment

Arduino Micro Controller

Temperature Sensor

Lego Mindstorms

Using the Arduino to link the environment to GH

Temperature Sensor

Arduino Grasshopper with Firefly plug-in

Alternative method; accessing public data streams through the use of APIs

Data Steam’s URL XML Reader

gHowl plug-in

Component Cluster to sort data

Kinect

Capturing Data Storing Data

1 Geometry in Rhino on desktop

2 Online Database in the cloud

3 Personal Database Server

Now that we have data, how do we store it for retrieval later?

ADVANTAGES•You can see and touch the data points•You can color code the data points – begin to interpret patterns•Quick and easy – if working with a small amount of data

DISADVANTAGES•Rhino only exists in a local file – inaccessible by other programs or people on its own•Quickly slows down as size of data increases (100+ megabytes)•Hard to incorporate back into the digital computation workflow

Bake Geometry into Rhino

Remote Storage via Cosm.com

ADVANTAGES•Data can be accessed globally and can be shared easily •Rich user community for help•Safe/Reliable/It’s someone else’s problem to keep the server running•Simple UI for accessing data history through website

DISADVANTAGES•Limited to the data stream rate (30 updates per minute max)•Slow & difficult to retrieve data stream history (must download in batches - 1000 points at a time)•You can specify dates of what information to retrieve, but you can’t search the database without

downloading all of the data

* Formerly Pachube

Personal mySQL Database via Slingshot

ADVANTAGES•It can store a lot of data and it’s generally fast•It can be accessed by other people on the network – real time, multi-user collaboration is possible•A relatively easy data management tool

DISADVANTAGES•You have to administer the server, including set up and maintenance •Can’t share data globally outside of network walls•Steeper learning curve for sending and retrieving data compared to other two methods

RHINO IN REALITY: CONNECTING

DESIGN TO THE REAL WORLD