September Arduino BlinkM Project

As the link indicates, the Windows version is a little different (not much, though).
I'll see if I can post the Windows one, or perhaps a cross-platform version that works everywhere.

-bill

First of all, my Arduino from Sparkfun was in perfect condition...and I just received the BlinkMs. The Arduino sketch seems to work using a terminal emulator but refuses to work with the Perl code, both on Linux and my modified version for Windows. Sending seems to go ok as far as I can tell but nothing ever comes back.

Is there something funny going on with control lines? Time to get out the scope :-(.

I came up with some simple code (essentially a terminal emulator) that works with the BlinkMTester code for Arduino downloaded from here: http://thingm.com/fileadmin/thingm/downloads/BlinkM_Examples.zip. All it does is allow the commands implemented by the BlinkMTester to be typed on the PC but at least it proves the basic concept. The only change I made to BlinkMTester was to set the port speed to 115200.

Since I don't yet have a convenient place to post code (maybe the group should have one?), I'll add the Windows version here (the two Linux version changes are as in Scott's original code). Due to the way the code works, I got away with a sleep(1) instead of a sleep(2). And as you'll see, Perl is not a language I use very much!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

# Change line below for Linux
use Win32::SerialPort qw( :STAT 0.20 );

# Change line below for Linux or for different COM port
my $port = Win32::SerialPort->new("COM12") || die "Failed to open port\n";

$port->baudrate(115200);
$port->parity("none");
$port->handshake("none");
$port->databits(8);
$port->stopbits(1);
$port->read_char_time(0);
$port->read_const_time(20);
sleep(1);

while(1)
{
my $response = "";
my $timeout_tries = 50;

while ($timeout_tries > 0)
{
my ($count, $data) = $port->read(255);

if ($count > 0)
{
$response .= $data;
last if ($data =~ /cmd>/);
}

$timeout_tries--;
}

if ($timeout_tries)
{
print "$response";
}
else
{
die("Arduino is not responding\n");
}

while (1)
{
my $inp = ;
chomp($inp);
if (length($inp) == 0)
{
next;
}
if (lc(substr($inp, 0, 1)) eq "x")
{
exit(0);
}
$port->write($inp);
last;
}
}

How about this for a slightly longer term goal - since the whole idea is that the Arduino is the hardware interface that allows PC programs to do things, we could develop code for the Arduino that allows the Arduino's operation to be specified by the PC application. This would mean that no other Arduino programming is required to use it as a sort of proxy hardware interface.

For example, an interface to the Arduino could be developed that allowed the application to define which pins on the Arduino are being used for which function (say I2C, ADC, GPIO or whatever). The interface would then also include a way of writing data to an I2C device, reading back data, reading back ADC values, setting and getting GPIO states etc. For perhaps some specific support for popular devices (such as the BlinkM) could be added also. Not to mention Arduino shields...

In this way the Arduino becomes a standard and very easy way of controlling devices from a PC. Might be of interest to those who don't want to get involved directly with Arduino programming. So some Arduino code along with library code for popular langauges to assist with PC application development might have some value out there in the big wide world.

Funny - I was just looking at Github and wondering if that was the way to go :-). My name there is "tirokartchief".

I just installed the Arduino IDE on my Ubuntu laptop. (Yesterday it was on my Mac desktop, but I'm not lugging that to the meeting). The Arduino web site's Ubuntu instructions were spot on. (Running 10.4). I got the Perl and Python samples both working and also uploaded the sketch (again, but this time from the laptop). Interesting: I got "Arduino is not responding" on the very first run of simple_serial.py after the sketch upload, *then* it started working... not sure why.

Scott, you were right about the colon being the line-terminator in the serial monitor output box. I was not familiar with that convention.

Fortunately everything has worked so far because I find the thing rather befuddling. I'm looking forward to learning!