I've connected a Sparkfun Electronics USB RFID Reader to my machine.

Each RFID tag I scan sends a unique string of characters and numbers like these.

56001842E6EA
5600184DF6F5
560017B9C830
56002C423109

I've tested the reader through the arduino serial monitor and the numbers are displaying correctly.

now I want to be able to import the numbers to PD. I'm sure my problem is a coding error on my part (which is why I haven't posted this in the hardware section) as I'm new to PD.

The USB reader is on port 8 at 9600.

I set up the attached simple patch.

For some reason the it prints the following results in the console.

print: 2
print: 53
print: 54
print: 48
print: 48
print: 49
print: 56
print: 52
print: 50
print: 69
print: 54
print: 69
print: 65
print: 13
print: 10
print: 3

If anyone could point me int he right direction I'd appreciate it.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/read_from_serial.pd

...but it should have been:

print: symbol 5
print: symbol 6
print: symbol 0
print: symbol 0
print: symbol 1
print: symbol 8
print: symbol 4
print: symbol 2
print: symbol E
print: symbol 6
print: symbol E
print: symbol A

..right?!

...have a look at [makefilename]...

Thanks for this.

I can find very little help on the makefilename symbol, at least nothing I fully understand. There is just far too much PD jargon in forum discussions and nothing in terms of tutorials.

Where should I start?

[makefilename %c] will convert an ASCII code into its character (it's documented in the [pd More_Info] subpatch in [makefilename]'s helpfile). I'm guessing the some of those characters are basically tags telling you where the beginning and end of the string is. You can use those to, say, determine when to begin making a list and when to dump it as the full set of characters. You can make the list like this:

X[t l]
|
So you can use the start character to empty and start filling it up, then use the ending character to dump what's in , which will have the full list of characters. If you need to convert that list into a single symbol, use [zexy/list2symbol].

[sprintf %c] always seems to me like a less mysterious way to convert to chars, so how about ...

|
[sel 3 2 10 13 ]
| |
| [sprintf %c]
| /
| /
| /
[repack 20]
|
[print]

(Based on parser_tester.pd from
http://puredata.hurleur.com/viewtopic.php?pid=11012#p11012 )

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/ascii-to-list-RFID.pd

Thanks for the replies.

I found a solution here: http://hacklab.recyclism.com/workshops/rfid-arduino-pd/

The patch is quite complicated. I'm not sure if it needs to be but I have it working now anyway.