Hey! Could anyone help me get started importing data from Arduino into PD-Vanilla?

I have a gyroscope / accelerometer project in Arduino which serial.prints 6 data points from each of the accelerometer and gyroscope axes. I would like to bring these 6 data points into PD-Vanilla and unpack them so that they can separately drive objects in PD.

Does anyone know how to do this in PD-Vanilla?

Best
Jess

@Jess btw I'm using a Mac

I've used the external [comport] to talk over USB serial to an Arduino on both MacOS and Windows, never had an issue.

There's no vanilla way to have the Arduino talk straight to Pd. You either have to use [comport] (which is recommended), or use some other software to receive data from the Arduino (like Python) and send that to Pd over OSC.

Oh I'm sorry, I missed that the solution has to be pure vanilla. Well if the Arduino has WiFi or ethernet, you can send OSC or FUDI messages to vanilla over TCP or UDP. I've had success with both MKR1000 and an Uno with a knock-off W5100 ethernet shield.

@jameslo I don't think it has to be pure vanilla.
@Jess has asked about zexy too.
David.

hey thanks all!

I've now added the comport function and connected it to the arduino serial port, which as far as I can tell seems to be working ok.

I'm not sure though how to retrieve the 6 co-ordinate data points. I found an old thread (https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/7356/arduino-to-pure-data-via-serial-how-to-unpack-data-from-acceleromete) that was suggesting using repack and then unpack to pull each of the co-ordinate data points out separately.

I'm not seeing any numbers coming out of the unpack object though - perhaps I'm radically over-simplifying!, but might anyone know what I'm missing?

@Jess Here's an example of parsing 2 floats in Pd:

Note the formatting on the Arduino side if you want to use fudiparse.

Edit: This is one of those arcane situations where the "list" prefix isn't necessary, don't ask me why (but I know @whale-av knows), so you can delete that Serial.print("list "). Also, I think the [t b b] isn't necessary. The [list prepend] is just enqueuing all the ASCII except CR until an LF is seen, then queue is cleared and the ASCII list is parsed into a proper Pd list.

@jameslo Yes, the [t b b] is needed to clear the list. Pd will always drop the list prefix if the first entry of the list is a number.

@ingox RE [t b b], I'm thinking it doesn't matter whether the queue is cleared before or after the list is fudiparsed (verbification of Pd object?) because I don't think Pd will process the next com character until after the full message tree is evaluated. Am I wrong? I think that's also why you can't write a busy wait.

@jameslo True, since it goes to a cold inlet, the order is not relevant here.

Using Serial.print() can be tricky as it outputs ASCII values and not raw bytes, like Serial.write() does. I have written an abstraction to be used with [comport] and Serial.print(), it's called [serial_print] and you can get it here https://github.com/alexdrymonitis/Arduino_Pd
Read the Readme first as you'll might need to use [serial_print13] instead. Also read the Arduino code to see how to format your Arduino data. It's really easy to use this.

great! thanks so much, I went with the fudiparse option in the end and works perfectly!

thanks again for all the suggestions
Jess