Firefly 1.0.0.69 Now Available

It's been entirely too long since my last update, but I'm proud to announce that a new version of Firefly (1.0.0.69) is now available!  There are a lot of new features and components with a few bug fixes as well.  

If you want to jump straight in, you can download the latest build from the Firefly website or from Food4Rhino project page. Or, if you'd rather learn more about all the new features, keep reading!

Improved Arduino Support

The Firefly Firmata (Arduino Sketch) has gone through a massive overhaul - making it much more compact, efficient, and extensible.  The sketch is now just over 230 lines of code (compared to more than 500 in the previous version).  But more importantly, the firmata is now more extensible; making it easier to add support for new Arduino boards... Like what you ask?  Well, support for the new Arduino Due platform for example.  The Arduino Due is an advanced board and while it may look similar to the Arduino Mega... it's actually quite different under the hood.  It features an ARM Cortex-M3 CPU which means its really fast.  It also features 12-bit analog resolution for reading and writing (which is pretty awesome).  As I said, the Due is a more advanced board and it does require some caution when getting started.  You can find out more about the Due platform at the Arduino Due Getting Started page.

One of the biggest changes with the revision of the Firmata was that it required some structural changes with how the data is sent/received from Grasshopper.  So, if you are planning on using the latest version of the Firmata, you'll need to also have the latest Firefly components installed as well.  This shouldn't be an issue because the installer will place the new Firefly Firmata in your sketchbook folder and install the new components as well... but it's worth noting so you don't try to mix and match the versions.

Kinect Version 2 Support

Earlier this summer, Microsoft released a new and improved version of its popular Kinect motion tracking sensor.  The sensor includes better body, hand, and joint orientation, 1080p color video (1920x1080), depth video (512x424), and a new active infrared video (512x424).  The sensor now has the capability to track up to 6 people at once (compared to only two people with the previous version).

This build of Firefly now comes with three new components to work with this new sensor.  The Video Stream can access the color, depth, and infrared video streams at different resolutions.  Simply right-click on the video component to choose the video feed and resolution.  Note: You may need to update your graphics card in order to get the infrared video stream to work properly (at least I did before it began working properly). The Skeleton Tracker is similar to the previous version, but can now track up to 6 people.  And the Mesh Reconstruction component will build a fully colored 3D mesh using the color and depth data from the sensor.  I plan to add more components to this section soon, but I wanted to go ahead and release this so more people could use it!  [EDIT: I would like to thank Panagiotis Michalatos for his collaboration in the development of the Kinect V2 tools].

New Computer Vision Tools

This release also includes a number of new computer vision tools.  One component to note is the Bitmap Tracer, which can be seen in action here. The Bitmap Tracer component spawns a number of randomly generated particles which trace the edges of a bitmap using the nearest contouring vector.  Another pair of components is the Bitmap Decompose/Recompose which can either decompose or reconstruct a bitmap using a list of values for its constituent channels.  These two can be used together to swap channels in an image (think chroma keying).  There's also a Bitmap Threshold component which uses the average dithering algorithm to find the color quantization of an image.  Lastly, I've updated the Leap Motion Finger Tracking component to work with the latest release of the Leap v2.2.1 software release.  The component now has improved finger tracking including joint and bone position/orientation.

In addition to these new features, there's also a number of bug fixes too (check out the readme if your interested). As always, I welcome any and all feedback on this build.  Your support really helps, so please let me know what you think!