#EEXpat II, Day 15 – Coins. Using ‘War’ from Day 8 and ‘the thing that broke before I could test’ it from Day 11, I am feeding the Euros faster and faster to keep the machine guns crackling and the blood spilling.

Obviously it could have been a more sophiticated setup for the documentation than before daylit window curtains… but ok for a one-day prototype (and I was too tired from reworking last year’s code for this).

The thing-that-broke was a coin acceptor, which I have improvisedly housed in a rectangular cable duct but the soldering turned out to be bad and a cable went off with the solding iron far away. So I could not make progress that day.

But later connected to a Raspberry Pi’s GPIO, some python code is used to read and decode the pulses coming out from the coin acceptor for different coins. It needs to be trained before with up to 30 different samples for a coin type and I had trouble finding that many, but at least it held up for a while here with no problems.

Original Video in widescreen format

The video’s original footage is from freestockfootagearchive.com (‘Blood splatter 70s 80s effects stock footage’, ‘splatter on the floor – blood stock footage’). The audio is from freesoundeffect.net. Multiple filters have been applied to make it sound more aggressive. One interesting thing is that, originally posted on facebook, the video plays automatically muted. But the perception will only be framed the right way with the sound, as emotions will do with the reality of war.