PS Move Fireplace
The Story
During the 2012 holiday season I purchased several used Playstation Move controllers to play the Johan Sebastian Joust beta. Since I don't own a Playstation, I wanted to extract some additional value out of the purchase. I proceeded to use Python and the PS Move API to write simple useless programs.
At the time my television was used primarily as a faux fireplace, so one lazy evening I decided to make some improvements. The idea was to use the Move controller's RGB LEDS to emulate a flickering flame behind the television.
The Parts
- 6 Playstation Move Controllers
- PC/Mac
- PS Move API
The Code
The program simply cycles through and array of various RGB values representing different orange/yellow hues. For each array entry it updates the LED value on all connected Move controllers. Fire flickers at a rate of 1-20 Hz, so I choose a value in that range (10 Hz) for the delay between LED updates (i.e. 0.1 seconds).
Full code can be downloaded here.
Note: The 'sys.path.insert' line is particular to the install location of the PS Move API on my PC.
The Result