Interoperability between Arduino and Windows

Projects Programming
1

Good morning.

I discovered Arduino some months ago and had a lot of fun so far using it.
I am trying now to connect my Mega2560 to a windows XP laptop in order to display in a nicer and bigger way the data processed by the Arduino. I already display “locally” some data on a couple of graphic LCDs. It is fine but I need to display similar data bigger and in colour on the laptop sreen.

My questions are the following:

  1. How can I make the Arduino and a windows XP application to communicate (the application reads and process data sent by Arduino and PC sends data to Arduino)
  2. Do you know any Windows software allowing to build quickly a graphical interface ? And why not to dream a software already interfaced with Arduino?

Thank you a lot.
Raoul.

2

My questions are the following:

  1. How can I make the Arduino and a windows XP application to communicate (the application reads and process data sent by Arduino and PC sends data to Arduino)
  2. Do you know any Windows software allowing to build quickly a graphical interface ? And why not to dream a software already interfaced with Arduino?
  1. think most used is the Serialport , print it to the PC, the PC should capture it and process it
    alternative - wthershield and send it to a webserver (e.g. Apache/PHP) running on your PC store it in a DB (mySQL) and display it again
  1. Processing is often used in the Arduino community, but other prefer Python or C#
    What is you favorite language?

NOte there is a separate section on the forum just about connectivity with PC - Interfacing w/ Software on the Computer -

3

Thank you for your answer.

I am not a software programmer and I learnt by using Arduino, so probably I am more familiar with C than any other language.
What I would like to achieve in the PC is quite simple: displaying into a window the data processed by Arduino in a nice way with limited interaction with the user (maybe to switch from one screen to another one).
So I plan to invest less time as possible in learning a new language (in the short term I would like to move forward on my project) even if later on I may feel the need to do it and then rework the project…

I didn’t knew about Processing and I found it quite interesting. I will have a deeper look on it.

I am still open to any suggestion.

Thank you again for supporting.

Raoul.