Can't complile TimeAlarm library without getting error Alarm out of scope

Projects Programming
15

You should really forget that the Serial Monitor application even exists. You can NOT use it and Processing at the same time. DO NOT EVEN TRY!

And when I do get something to show up on the Arduino serial monitor, it's gibberish, not time or words, which makes me think that WHEN something is passed from processing to Arduino, it's not simple ASCII letters

It isn't.

  1. be able to grab the Mac system time and print to serial monitor in the processing window (this step does not require Arduino serial interface yet). I had this working before and I'm trying to recreate it.

The "time" that is passed to the serial port is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, not a string like "07:10:12". Is that number going to tell you anything?

  1. be able to pass system time (or a test phrase) from Processing to Arduino and print to Arduino serial monitor (this will require solving both the problem of "one serial port for processing, arduino, and arduino serial monitor", and the problem of "gibberish appears on the Arduino serial monitor").

You can't. Get over it.

You CAN make Processing READ serial data, and emulate what the Serial Monitor application is doing.

  1. be able to pass an analog input or some prestored test phrase from Arduino to Processing and print to processing serial monitor, just to show that I can do this both ways.

What have you tried? Besides complaining?

  1. be able to print the mac system time to an LCD attached to the Arduino (that was the whole point of this effort, I'm try to build an Ardunino/LCD clock that grabs time, weather, email, sports scores etc off the internet via the Mac).

You should realize by now that the "time" isn't a string, and that you will need to convert the number of seconds sine January 1, 1970 into a meaningful number of hours, minutes, seconds since a different reference time (midnight last night, typically). There are ways to do this, if you google Unix time.

There is even a method in the Time library, setTime() that takes the Unix time. Then, you can use hour(), minute(), and second() to get the "current" time.