3D Binary Clock
Several weeks ago a friend of mine wanted to put up a large display in our school using a projector. He wanted to use it to display some sort of raw information in an artistic fashion. His idea was to use network traffic as a base for information, but in order to get funding for the project he needed something, anything, to display on the projector. He was telling me about this problem and was talking about how he learned of a new programming language called Processing. After looking into it, Processing seemed like a really easy way to create graphical programs. Processing even makes it simple to display things in 3D. I decided to try to create a program that my friend could display on the projector in order to get his funding. We both brainstormed for a bit and decided that a binary clock should be pretty simple to program. It would be easy to display 1’s and 0’s just using colors. We both thought that it would look a lot more interesting if the numbers were represented as rotating cubes. Hence, this program was created.
You can view the Java applet running by clicking here.
(The Processing language is entirely based on Java, so You will need a Java plugin enabled in your browser to view that page correctly)
The cubes will rotate randomly in one of four directions each time. The clock should show the time on your local machine, not on the server. The portion of the program that controls the background was programmed by my friend Sean. The actual clock was written by me. It took me a few days to learn the language and get this program fully functional. The documentation for this language is pretty limited. They really only have a set of examples. It’s up to you to figure out what the code in the examples does.