After reading Stephen Wolfram mind blowing blog post "Injecting Computation Everywhere", I tried to reproduce some of the demos he had for his SXSW talk. The results obtained adding just a little bit of code were quite surprising to me. Here is what happened when I injected the data from an accelerometer connected to an Arduino into the Wolfram Language using a few Graphics3D directives, six spheres and a pair of tubes:



Tadaa! Homer Simpson started computing the trajectory of a three-dimensional object!



To create this experiment I used the same hardware listed by Arnoud in this post  "Connecting to an accelerometer over a serial connection" (but instead of connecting the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi, I used my own laptop):

• 5V ready triple-axis accelerometer (+-3g analog output)
• Half-size bread board
• Male/male jumper wires
• Arduino Uno

Once everything has been wired follow these steps:

• First upload the following Sketch to your Arduino:

• Take note of the serial port name that you will be using.

• Connect the Arduino into the Wolfram Language. (The name of my port was "usbmodemfa131", replace it for the one you are using)

• Check the data streamed by the Serial when the accelerometer lies flat:

• Then set a function to scale the three coordinates XYZ between -1g and 1g:

• When the function is applied to the buffer's values, and the accelerometer lies flat, the average vector should approximate {0,0,1}g

• Once the accelerometer has been calibrated, run the following ScheduledTask every 0.1 seconds:

Now, you are ready to dynamically control Homer Simpson's eyes