Graphing pitch and volume

Different ways of displaying pitch and (measured a little later) volume using TurtleArt

Direction = pitch, radius= volume

with only dots at the end of the line

colour determined by volume (measured a little later again)

x = pitch, y=volume

Challenges:

• No code is given here, create these graphs
• Make other graphs
• A third variable to graph is number of occurrences of a pitch/volume pair
• Can you get useful information from these graphs? Can you tell speech from music, TV program from advertisment?
• The pitch block only shows the pitch of the loudest component. This is derived from a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). Can you program a Python block to show all the spectral components and their amplitude? (Look at the source to see how the FFT is done)
• With more than one laptop you can log more data. Can you combine data from multiple laptops and graph it? How will you synchronize the data?
  

Turtle Art and USB serial devices

Using the Python block to interface with a USB serial device (tested with the Arduino)

Requires the Pyserial library. The recommended install procedure does not work because it requires a developer installation of Python python2.6-dev

Instead copy the serial directory here to the directory home/olpc/Activities/TurtleArt.activity

Load the Python block with this code

Tested on an Arduino, the Arduino had a simple echo program loaded using the Arduino IDE on another computer but this should work with any board with a FTDI FT232R USB serial chip

Ideas for controlling devices with the FTDI FT232R USB serial chip here

Turtle calculus

Its easy to plug in various functions as a graph's gradient in Turtle Art. The resulting graph is the integral of the function used as the gradient. In the below case, the gradient is 1 and its integral is a straight line, f(x)=x



Plug in a linear gradient, -2+x/100, and make a parabola with zero crossings at x=0 and x=400



A quadratic gradient generates a cubic with zero crossings at x=0 and x=300

The integral of sin is -cos
(by the chain rule)

making dy/dx =y gives an exponential curve
but a nonzero value at x=0 is necessary, in this case forward 1 means f(0)=1
starting at 0, f(0)=0 has a solution of a straight line f(x)=0


Challenges
Graph for negative x
Graph the exponential for f(0)=-1 explain
The exponential above is for dy/dx = y/100 what exactly is the formula for the graph?
Find more interesting integrals
Graph the derivative of a function
Iteratively solve d2y/dx2 =-y
Explain the offset in the graph of -cos
A step size of 1 is used, what error does the step size introduce?