Adding Firefly Firmata to any Arduino Sketch

Is there a quick way to add the firmata to any Arduino sketch? It would be nice to set up a custom Arduino sketch and then designate which pins you want to be read in Grasshopper.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on November 15, 2012 at 10:34am

Hey Erick,

I'm a little confused... since the purpose of the Firefly Firmata is to set up "all" the pins so that you can talk back and forth between the Arduino and Grasshopper. If you have a custom script, it's probably easiest to just use the Generic Serial Read component and then just parse up the data (depending on how you format the string) once the data is read into GH. Conversely, you can make you're own custom script and use the Uno Read component, as long as the data is formatted in the same way as the Firmata. The Firefly Firmata takes all six analog inputs, and three digital inputs and prints them to the serial port (using Serial.println() as the final print statement... which adds a carriage return and line feed to the string... which is important because this is what GH uses to determine where the end of the line is). So, you can send any type of numeric data as long as you have nine total values (some of which can be dummy values if you want) and making sure they're all separated by commas (the Uno Read splits the data up at the commas). From there you can do whatever you want with the data. Does this help?

-Andy

Permalink Reply by Erick Katzenstein on November 15, 2012 at 11:19am

Andy,

I was having trouble getting the Serial Read component to work with the serial.print from Arduino. It's working now so all is well. I'm using the CapSense library and it's pretty awesome. Thanks and sorry for the dumb question.

Erick

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on November 15, 2012 at 11:40am

That's ok. Glad it's working. I have an updated CapSense version of the Firmata if you'd like to test it out. Just shoot me an email.

-Andy

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