I need help writing a program on the PC so that it can receive/respond to messages from my arduino atmega 328
The end result will be that i can have a pressure sensor on my punching bag, and control a game I made on my computer. (along with other sensors)
I know that this forum is normally on the arduino side, but I'm having a hard time figuring this out, and hoping there might be someone who could get me started.
Short term you can use the serial monitor to monitor data being supplied from the arduino. Beyond that you can make a program in numerous programming environments that support serial port communications to slice/dice/display the info as you like.
For assigning a shortcut to Arduino, check out this post http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1275739959
A program named "AAC keyboard" converts this serial character to keyboard character. And then a "Autohotkey script" will do the shortcut job.
Thanks for the help. I followed those links and found gobetwino in one of the posts. I think I can use this as a quick fix, but I'll also keep looking for more complicated ways of directly programming the arduino into my game.