Our Project will take the idea of “The Butterfly Effect”

Basically for this project, we will be having many butterflies in a container with a habitat that allows them to survive for weeks, the butterflies will be used as an input for the camera’s tracking system and every time a butterfly fly over certain area, a visual will be generated through Max MSP.

The whole container will be placed on a specially made table with a projector in the table and a square hole directly below the container of butterflies, the bottom of the container will be opaque and the projector in the table will be projecting up to the bottom of the container through the square hole, making a screen like appearance at the base of the container.

For our project, we need to have real butterflies, after our research, we found out that Oh’ Farms will be selling caterpillars, on Saturday, we went there trying to purchase the caterpillars, however they were sold out and said the primary school purchased all of their caterpillars and they will restock in 2 weeks time, the shopkeeper also said that it will take around a month for the caterpillars to fully grow into butterfly, so unless we got the caterpillar this week, it will be not possible for us to have butterfly for the submission. So… Alternative plan is to go catch caterpillars/cocoon of butterfly ourself
This is Stick insect Oh’ Farms sell, I think its kind of interesting.

As for the butterfly, I think the best way is to find for butterfly in the park and instead of catching the butterfly straight, it will be easier to catch caterpillar or cocoon, therefore we went to Parks and look for butterfly, since there is butterfly of the species there, there will be its caterpillar nearby.
Acraea violae (Tawny Coster)

Eurema hecabe contubernalis (Common Grass Yellow)

Zizula hylax pygmaea (Pygmy Grass Blue)

The above photo was taken in Yewtee Park, I also found 4 cocoon from the trees and bush there, it might be the cocoon of moth, but nonetheless, if it look like butterfly, it will work

 

For this week Milestone,

We’ve got our idea out, found where to find butterfly/cocoon/caterpillars and got ourself some cocoon to try wether it will become a moth or butterfly, we also purchased some cheap mini webcam from the web and will use it for our project.

our planned timeline for our project will be:

Week 10-11:

• Write up a rough Max Patch for Motion tracking using camera and particle/visual generation from the point/blob that was tracked by the motion tracking.
• Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area and see how long they need to become butterfly + research more about butterfly.

Week 11-12:

• Build the Container for the butterfly and test the max patch within the container with fake butterfly mockup from paper.
• Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area and see how long they need to become butterfly + how long could a butterfly survive + more butterfly research + get food for butterfly/caterpillar

Week 12-13:

• refine the max patch to get it to work with a smooth flow and generate good visual worthy for submission
• try to connect two computer together
• learn how to output control real life electronics like a fan or light bulb, either straight from max or serial to Arduino.
• Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area + get food for butterfly/caterpillar

Week 13-14:

• further refine everything and make sure all component of the project works seamlessly.
• Shoot the video for our final submission
• Edit the video
• Catch more caterpillar/cocoon from different area + get food for butterfly/caterpillar

Before 21st April:

upload everything we have onto OSS.