Boston Python Workshop 3/Saturday/ColorWall

Program graphical effects for a ColorWall using the Tkinter GUI toolkit. See the ColorWall in action here.

Setup

See the Friday setup instructions.

Goals

• Have fun experiment with and creating graphical effects.
• Practice using functions and classes.
• Get experience with graphics programming using the Tkinter GUI toolkit.

Suggested exercises

• Find and change the colors used in the Checkerboards effect, and re-run the effect:

  python run.py Checkerboards
  

  Then change the line

      if (x + y + i) % 2 == 0:
  

  to

      if (x + y + i) % 3 == 0:
  

  re-run the effect, and see what changed.

• Find and change the color of the columns in the Matrix effect, and re-run the effect:

  python run.py Matrix
  

  Each column that we see on the wall corresponds to a Column object. Add some randomness to the color used by each column (the variable whose value you changed above) using the random.random function, re-run the effect, and see what happens.

• Walk through Twinkle. Find explanations of the random.randint and random.uniform functions in the online documentation at http://docs.python.org/library/random.html. Experiment with these functions at a Python prompt:

  import random
  random.randint(0, 1)
  random.randint(0, 5)
  random.uniform(-1, 1)
  

  Then experiment with the numbers that make up the hue and re-run the effect:

  python run.py Twinkle
  

• Write your own effects!

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