/swarm

swarm xscreensaver clone in Processing, hopefully will run on Arduino or LPC1343 with Adafruit 128x64 OLED display, maybe even a screen saver for a modern OS.

Primary LanguageC

Swarm
Eye Candy
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by J.P. McGlinn
jmcglinn (at) speakeasy (dot) net
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Free use license, but if you find it useful please provide
attribution.

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The Swarm is a third party AfterDark screen saver module by
Leo Breebaart. Should also work with DarkSide of the Mac. I
found it on AppleFritter with source code. This was the first
easy source code I could find.

There is a .net C# version floating around but the download 
link required a login and I was too lazy to create an account.

Swarm is available as a screen saver on SGI IRIX. I have an
Indy sitting on my desk right now so I can watch it a bit.

I would try out the AfterDark module, but maybe later. I have
a fitting Mac (WorkGroup Server 6100/66) to try, but don't feel
like setting it up right now.

I want to make a version that displays on the 128x64 OLED
display sold by Adafruit.com. I was thinking of using Arduino
or maybe more interestingly, on the LPC1343 ARM processor. I
originally thought a nice project would be porting the SSD1306
Arduino library from Adafruit to the LPC1343 within the LPC1300
library published by MicroBuilder (Kevin Townsend), but then
Kevin created SSD1306 support.

I took a look at Swarm by Alasdair Turner on
http://www.openprocessing.org unfortunately it was not the
swarm following a queen I was looking for, but it was one of
the closest things I could find. I used a little bit of it,
but the movement is all wrong in his version so the algorithm
is different in my work. See Alasdair Turner here:
http://www.openprocessing.org/portal/?userID=1033
See his Swarm implementation here:
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=7499

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HISTORY
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13-Mar-2011 noop

6-Feb-2011 detailed Alasdair Turner's work and cleaned up
my Processing prototype a little.

6-Feb-2011 Swarm github repository created and first working
prototype in Processing uploaded, along with other bits for
reference.