But Rainbowduino support improved as well. I fixed lots of bugs and implemented requested features. Now you can control the display brightness, save up to 10 frames onto the device and serial port is auto detected. In general, I defined an basic API to communicate with the devices, which allows you to add more devices easily (e.g. monome!). With that, all Rainbowduino stuff is moved in a separate Rainbowduino Processing library.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See official mtXcontrol project page for more.

Yay, I finally released my Launchpad Processing Library. Please see it’s project page and source at github.

Videos & more are coming soon. (Yes, this includes an updated mtXcontrol Version with Launchpad support!!)

For that, I needed Serial communication within ruby. Thanks to ruby-serialport first steps went quite well. I could write OR read from and to Arduino easily. But for some reasons, writing AND reading using the same instance didn’t work out.

I used a simple ‘send-input-back’ sketch on the Arduino side. So every byte I’m sending is returned back. I checked with the Arduino IDE Serialmonitor and a simple Processing script – everything worked alright. But using ruby it was different. Writing to serial port worked okay, but reading from it was just random. Sometimes I read the response, sometime I didn’t – really, really weird. Some headaches and a lot of time testing I finally found the solution: just open two instances of the serial port. One for sending, one for reading – and, surprise, surprise – it works perfect! Who would have guessed that!? Strange..

// To be completed
require 'serialport'
port_write = Serialport.new()
port_read = Serialport.new()

Ok, continuing hacking, more soon…