Processing library for the Leap Motion controller
See also the Leap Hacking Web site for news and articles about making the most of your Leap Motion device.
This is (as you may have guessed) a Processing library to make it easier to use the Leap Motion Java libraries in your sketches.
Distribution of the actual Leap Motion library files is currently not allowed by Leap Motion so you have to provide those yourself.
You should use the most current Leap Motion libraries available. If this P5 library does not work with the latest Leap libs then this library is broken (and a bug report should be filed).
To get the build process working on different development machines a few environment variables are needed:
P5_SKETCHBOOK defines the location of your Processing sketchbook folder
ECLIPSE_WORKSPACE defines the location of your Eclipse workspace folder (needed to provide some core Processing files)
See build.properties for more details on building a Processing library.
You need to have Apache ant installed in order to run the build.
These steps assume the ant executable is already on your %PATH%. If not, then you can use the full path the executable.
cd resources
ant
cd ..
Seems pretty simple, right? Here's the catch: every so often this fails (on Windows).
I get errors such as
c:\Users\james\repos\LeapMotionP5\resources\build.xml:268: Couldn't rename temporary file
Re-running the process usually takes care of this.
Another issue is when ant decides it will not delete the old jar file before copying over the new one.
What seems to be the cause is a hidden Java (i.e.Processing) process running that is referencing that jar. If you are trying out the library and kill your sketch it is possible for the sketch to appear to close while the underlying java.exe process is still running.
One of the goals of this library was to afford different ways for a Processing sketch to interact with the Leap code.
Most Processing tutorials teach users to create a setup function that prepares a few things, and a draw function that (often) handles the core sketch code.
More advanced Processing sketches, however, make use of callback handlers. Rather than relying on draw to initiate some action, a callback can be invoked by the behavior of some other code, often running in its own thread.
People who want to use a Leap Motion with their Processing sketches should not have to pick one approach over another.
Being able to grab Leap data on each call of draw makes it very easy to get started. Being able to use callbacks makes certain kinds of sketches easier to write. LeapMotionP5 aims to allow for a variety of programming approaches.
Towards that end the examples are geared to showing just how to do this.
The first such example was the "Pointer Location" demo.
A new example has been added that allows one to do finger painting.
There are multiple "Pointer Location" sketches, each designed somewhat differently.
There is currently just one "Finger Paint" demo, showing the "grab data inside draw()" approach to using the Leap library.
That will be expanded to show the other approaches.
Because the examples are quite similar there is a fair amount of common code. To avoid duplication there are some files holding the shared code. They need to be copied into each example sketch folder before running the sketch.
Note: these things were just recently updated, so some stuff might still be flakey.
(The MIT License)
Copyright (c) James Britt / Neurogami
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