Physical Computing Week Six Lab: Serial Output

Through no fault of ITP's, this week's lab was perhaps the most redundant task I've undertaken since starting the program.  This is largely due to the fact that when I started working at Dolby Laboratories, my first sizable task was to write almost the entire software stack for serial communciation on the Dolby Digital Cinema system.  As such, doing so in a basic manner on the arduino/processing platform ended up being pretty trivial.  That being said, it was fun to see it working, and to discover that processing and Dolby use the same serial back end libraries - RXTX!

Because of my strong familiarity with the material, I designed a relatively simple circuit employing a potentiometer to send analog data over the serial port.

Doing a read on this data was also relatively straightforward, allowing it to be piped into a graph in processing, which can be seen above.


Yay!  Serial communication!