For project 2, we decided to make a game console that let the user draw a picture on a p5 sketch like an Etch-a-Sketch. Here is the planning that we did for the project.

I got the slider to connect. But the output that I was getting was stopping at 255 then restarting at 0.

I realized it was an ASCII number format issue! I changed my code to reflect this.

After that, I was able to get a proper reading.

I applied my slider color code. However, the color kept on flicking: it would show the correct color but then randomly flick to red, which implied that it wasn't getting a proper reading the entire time and would get a 0 reading sometimes, therefore showing the red fill.

Pivot to a different design

We pivoted and no longer wanted to do this design.

I wanted the slider to bring back smoother values so that it didn't read the 0 value/red values in its reading.

My first attempt to solve this was to check to see if the Serial Monitor was recording 0/null values in the Arduino Serial Monitor. I didn't see evidence of this. The readings were also clearly not jumping dramatically, so there was no need for value smoothing functions.

This felt like it must have been an error on the side of p5 and Arduino handshake that needed to be resolved.

I thought that was might be most logical would be to first check in the console log on p5 what values it was reading, to see how often it was receiving a null value as I theorized it was receiving.

Here is where I saw null values being read. Interestingly, they were coming in at irregular intervals.

Based on this, I didn't think fiddling with the rate handshake was the way to go. I decided to attempt to write code that would disregard null values.