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last edited 17 years ago by bbogart

This is a page for my Arduino experiments.

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Here we have two sensors attached to the arduino as voltage dividers. Basically no matter the resistance value of the sensor it produces a voltage between 0-5 from its minimum and maximum physical limitations.

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This page will be for my work getting familar with Arduino so I can contribute to the hardware aspect of the PDDP project, and teach workshops on hardware and PD.

Howto:

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Getting the arduino IDE to work under Debian Etch

This is the old stuff from earlier this week. I'll eventually make this better and make a second "user centered" PD w/ Arduino howto based on the above.

Here is what I did to start talking to the Arduino:

  1. Download the pduino package (from CVS or WWW)
  2. Upload the firmware "Pd_firmware.pde" to the Arduino
    • I did this on the OS X machine using the Arduino Java IDE. I was not happy with the licences and hoops running the java environment on Linux. HCS tells me the java part is only the GUI so I'm going to have a crack on making an "IDE" replacer in PD.

    A. Connect Arduino to computer. I was using the USB to power the board, so it turned on as soon as I connected it to the machine. Make sure the power jumper is set to be powered by USB or that you have the powersupply connected before hooking up the USB.

    B. The console (tail -f /var/log/messages) should tell you that the FTDI chip was bound to the ttyUSB0 device.

  3. Open up the arduino-help.pd file from the Pduino package.
    • I needed to install the maxlib and Franks's list-abs to get the example to work. It also expects "tolist" in extra/mapping.
  4. comport (in CVS) assumes local serial ports (on linux /dev/ttyS0, ttyS1 etc..) In order to get comport to talk to your arduino you need to send the "devicename /dev/ttyUSB0" message to [ardunio]?. Then try the opening the serial ports intil pd connects to ttyUSB0. This will be printed to the PD console.
    • At the time of writing there is an interaction between digital inputs and analog input. You need to make sure to uncheck the "enable digitalIns" toggle box, it is checked by default.
  5. Select the number of Analog ins you are using (in this case I'm using 2) and you should see the red RX LED on the arduino board light up. You should see values from 0-1024 from the output of the corresponding analog input. In this case I'm sending exactly 0-5 volts, so I'm using the full resolution of the board with the full range of the sensor.
  6. The knob GUI in the screenshot is connected to the pot, with the horizontal slider connected to the slider.

This page is really just a start of documentation. I hope the process of making arduino work for end users easily with PD will lead to better documentation. I hope this page is of use.