I've started to play with microcontrollers and other embedded systems to create tools for performance artists.
It was a path from a very long soul searching effort. After some 18 years of professional career as a SWE I was really tired of anything related to programming. Finally I got to find something that actually motivates me to learn like it was when I was a young kid and programming was a fun and creative hobby.
I got into it after meeting so many incredible people in circus, dance and other performing arts and watching them struggle to make their dream projects come true due to a lack of technical software/hardware skills and lack of money to hire specialists for their projects. It gives me a lot of joy to get into their creative processes and dream together the possibilities, to push my skills to areas I had never worked with and to actually provide value to a community of artists, to be part of a creative process is also pretty magical to me.
Before this I went through a long lull of motivation to code anything outside of work, to study anything related to programming outside of work needs. I don't get any joy anymore from dreaming about apps and products that I could sell, they all just seem like a boring job on top of my job. Actually creating something related to the arts has been very, very refreshing to my soul.
So far I've been using a lot of Adafruit components. Their 9-DOF breakout sensor board is really cool to keep track of small movements and I pair it with a WiFi enabled Wemos D1 for wearables.
For my current project I'm creating vests with the 9-DOF sensor + Wemos D1 that connect to a central server and this server is a central dispatch to communicate with other stage parts (similar to the architecture of the Philips Hue Bridge). I have an Adafruit HUZZAH32 to control some stage lights and other equipment (fog machines, etc.).
My idea is to enhance the job of the light designers, instead of them having to choreograph with the artists every movement they can instead select areas of the set that should be reacting to the artists movements and the light FX are triggered by those movements at the points the light designer select as focus for the part.
For programming I'm mainly using CircuitPython or MicroPython as I love Python for the ease of prototyping and iterating over, and there are libraries for all the components I've needed so far :)
Edit: I've also started to look into DMX to integrate these tools into the normal workflow of stage lighting/FX.
The emergence of things like MicroPython and CircuitPython have been an amazing game changer for what people can do in the embedded world. It's amazingly fun and feels different enough from day to day work to be fun.
It was a path from a very long soul searching effort. After some 18 years of professional career as a SWE I was really tired of anything related to programming. Finally I got to find something that actually motivates me to learn like it was when I was a young kid and programming was a fun and creative hobby.
I got into it after meeting so many incredible people in circus, dance and other performing arts and watching them struggle to make their dream projects come true due to a lack of technical software/hardware skills and lack of money to hire specialists for their projects. It gives me a lot of joy to get into their creative processes and dream together the possibilities, to push my skills to areas I had never worked with and to actually provide value to a community of artists, to be part of a creative process is also pretty magical to me.
Before this I went through a long lull of motivation to code anything outside of work, to study anything related to programming outside of work needs. I don't get any joy anymore from dreaming about apps and products that I could sell, they all just seem like a boring job on top of my job. Actually creating something related to the arts has been very, very refreshing to my soul.