Banzi homework help! struggling with firmata + UNO

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Interfacing
1

Hi

I'm new to Arduino and new to the Forum. My first post is a shocker of text. Sorry!

I'm lucky enough to be doing a course with Massimo Banzi this week. :sunglasses:

First homework assignment sees us wiring together a game made in Processing with an arduino interface.

He wants us to use Firmata, but it's giving me serious issues.

I have an UNO and am running the latest ver of arduino on a Macbook Pro, OS X (all fully up to date).
I have the latest ver of processing and installed the latest "Arduino" library for Processing.

Here is what is happening:

  • I upload the StandardFirmata for UNO sketch to the board. I have an LED on pin 13 and after the upload I see that it blinks as it should with this sketch.
  • I then go over to processing and load up the arduino_output sketch from the examples.
  • It seems to compile ok and the list of serial ports are outputted to the console, but it never actually draws the sketch, no window pops up. It doesn't throw any errors either.
  • The board blinks a bit and it looks like there is some brief communication and then the board becomes unresponsive.
  • Closing processing and returning to Arduino and attempting to upload another sketch to the board results in Arduino hanging, and I need to force quit Arduino, unplug the board and replug and restart Arduino to get normal communication back between Arduino and the board.

THEN

  • I noticed that my computer would hang on restart or shutdown. Something was preventing shutdown.
  • I ran repair disk permissions and it fixes a bunch of permission errors in various Java libraries, also fixing the shutdown issue.
  • I tried uninstalling both Arduino and Processing and noticed that, despite not having any programs running, several Java libraries were "in use" and so it was not able to fully uninstall without a restart.

Reinstalling Java on OS X sounds like a major headache, hope thats not nessesary.
I'll try and use the Serial lbrary manually to get a result but I'm really hoping to use the Firmata route since it's what the homework requires.
Can anyone offer any insight or advice here? :slight_smile: