88 Proof Synth Bio Blog

Media-technology engineers at MIT have created a computer language and easy-to-use runtime environment called Processing, hosted at processing.org.  I wrote a small code snip for accessing the PIC microcontroller from a USB port, using Processing; it’s pasted below.

This PIC microcontroller connects to USB on a PC, Mac, or Linux machine

The Processing language and frameworks run on top of Java, so all Processing programs can run on Windows PC, or Unix, or Mac OS/X.  The frameworks are geared towards simple-to-write graphics and data presentation, though a lot of underlying Java libraries are directly accessible.

// Read firmware version from connected UBW Microcontroller; jcline 2009-03
import processing.serial.*;
Serial ubw;
String ubwVersion;
try {
  println(Serial.list());
  ubw = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[0], 9600);
  float tdelay=millis() + 5;
  for (int i=0; millis() < tdelay ; i++) {
      // Get+Verify UBW version string, print to console
      ubw.write("v\n");
      ubwVersion = ubw.readStringUntil('\n');
      if (ubwVersion != null) {
        if (ubwVersion.startsWith("UBW", 0)) {
          println("Found UBW attached to USB:\n");
          println(ubwVersion);
          break;
        }
      }
  }
}
catch (Exception e) {
  println("device access error\n");
}
println("done\n");

Listing 1: Access a UBW-firmware PIC Microcontroller from Processing

It looks like Processing might be a good environment for fetching and graphically animating information from my data acquisition project.  I’ll post more about these techniques if it works out.