In this project, you will combine art and science to showcase the diverse marine life found in our oceans. This is an introductory project that is great for newcomers to writing code as well as an Ocean Pi warm-up if you have a little bit of Python experience. This project will run in full during the fall 2024 voyage and in beta during our summer 2024 voyage.

This project borrows heavily from Mission Zero of the Astro Pi project, a project we love. We highly recommend you look through their project alongside ours. The Mission Zero walk-through can be found here. We use, adapt, and share portions of their work under the same Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Thank you, Astro Pi!

In this project, you are going to write code in the Python programming language to create a creature on an 8x8 LED array. You can create any creature, shape, or pattern that you like and we have some ideas below that you are welcome to borrow. You will give each LED a color command using red, green, blue values (RGB). RGB is not just for LEDs, it is a universal way for communicating color, so we can recreate the LED commands as a colored image. Since you are working with 64 colored squares, this will have a similar aesthetic to Minecraft. Thus, in writing code to control lights, you will also create a GIF image that we will animate.

Well…actually, the boat will animate your GIF. In your code, you will gather data from the Ocean Pi sensors to change the orientation of your image. You will also gather data from the color sensor to change the RGB value of a part of your image, causing it to animate in color as well as motion. All in all, you will do the following in this project:

• Store color values in variables

• Use color variables to control an LED array and create a GIF image

• Poll a sensor for environmental data

• Store the sensor data and use it to change your image

• Control your code with a timer

• Create an output file

If you finish this project and your code meets all of our criteria, you can send it to us to be run during our Ocean Pi voyage. We will run your code at a random time during the trip and send back to you your output file along with the ship’s log (time and position) for when your program was run. This will result in you having a completely unique image created by the ocean conditions of the Ocean Pi voyage—truly one of a kind!