Hi, I have an arduino already communicating with pd through processing but I'm thinking of cutting out the middle man and have a couple of questions if anyone could help me out a bit

1.Can pduino read and use string data sent out on the arduino serial?

2.Is there limitations on the sensor values pduino can handle? I thought I read somewhere that it can only handle values up to 255 because there are no limits on the sensor I am currently using(a rotary encoder).

3.Do you have to load a certain firmata example of the board? Or can you use #include <Firmata.h> to get it working? I'm asking because I have some custom code to handle a sensor that can't be handled by just firmata unfortunately.

1. You can use [print] and see what comes out of [arduino] or [comport] and see if you receive the string.

2. Concerning values AFAIK Serial.write write one byte, so 0-255, but there are ways to combine values in Arduino and Pd and increase it to 0-1023 for example.

3. For pduino you usually load the standard firmata sketch and then you set the arduino pins as input/output, servo or whatever, through Pd. Check the arduino-test.pd patch.

Just to add to question 3, Pduino is meant specifically to work with the Standard Firmata. The purpose is to get Pd-friendly messages out-of-the-box without having to write your own Arduino code. If you intend to write your own custom code, then it's probably better to use [comport] to get the data from your Arduino board and decipher the messages yourself.

Thanks for the info!!I had a bit of trouble trying to find out more myself I think I better stick to OSC and processing for the time being.

Just figured out a bit about strings. You can use [makefilename %c] which converts an ASCII number to its equivalent symbol. So if you try something like this i Arduino:

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.print("Hello World!");
}

void loop() {
}

and then in Pd you do this:

[comport 4 9600] <- which ever your port is...
|
[makefilename %c]

Should give you the string 'Hello World!" (without the quotes).
Now for putting it together I'm a bit puzzled. I connecting [makefilename] to

to get rid of the symbol prefix and I'm getting the letters one by one. If I connect [makefilename] straight to [add2 $1( and then to a message I do get the string but with spaces in between. Can't think of a way now, anyone knows how to put this together?

If there's a specific character that terminates your strings from the Arduino, you can bang [repack] when it occurs in order to build your stream of characters into a list, and then [list2symbol] set to an empty delimiter to convert to a symbol with no spaces.

For example, use Serial.println("Hello World!") from the Arduino to add CR and LF (ASCII 13 and 10) to the end of the sent string, then ...

[comport]
|
[sel 10 13 ] %bang on 10, ignore 13, convert all else to chars
| |
| [sprintf %c]
| /
| /
| /
[repack 50] [loadbang]
| |
| [symbol(
| |
[list2symbol]
|
[print]

See also
http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-8810-problem-importing-alpahnumeric-string-data-comport
and
http://puredata.hurleur.com/viewtopic.php?pid=11012#p11012

Just discovered that [sprintf %c] does not output anything if it receives a 32 (ASCII space), whereas [makefilename %c] does the right thing. So substitute [makefilename] for [sprintf] above.