The Arduino Networked Lamp

Projects Programming
1

Hello Community,
I purchased the book Make: Getting Started with Arduino, 3rd Edition at the end of 2020 and for several reasons I've been delaying the completion of this learning journey. Although, I think this book could be better if they add more explaining to concepts and not rushing to practice, even when I know the theory behind that is that one learns better by doing than theorizing, it would really help to have a better understanding of the topics.
So I am in chapter 7/ Talking to the Cloud and specifically the project of the Network Lamp, I downloaded the Processing software to create a proxy, set up the circuit in the breadboard exactly how the book indicates. I type the processing code for Processing and Arduino IDE. For the Arduino IDE had no problem but with processing I had some difficulties with the coding and kept giving me an error "the type Serial is ambiguous" in the line "Serial port;" that I typed from the book. I searched online and explains that Serial is ambiguous because your sketch has imported two different classes named Serial, so Processing doesn’t know which one port should use. AI suggested typing processing.serial.Serial port; and it worked.

The problem is that when I launch the codes nothing really happens with the LED lights. I got in my computer screen

image
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I purchased the new edition believing that a recent edition could have solved this issue. but it has the same sketch, there goes my $20 :roll_eyes:
Please if anybody could help me complete this exercise so I can learn from it and continue with the last project in the book. My goal is to master the coding part, specially for Arduino IDE and be able to create projects in my own and not be just be copying.
thanks from hot south Texas.

2

If I remember well, this project works by scanning the Makezine RSS feed for occurrences of specific words as we see in your image peace, love, and arduino and mapping how often each word appears to red, green, and blue values, then sending that as a color to the Arduino over serial.

➜ If the feed link does not work or currently doesn’t contain those words in its titles or descriptions, you’ll get zero counts and therefore black. This seems to be what the image is saying.

Can you share the feed link?

3

Feed link still exists and is populated: https://makezine.com/feed

Verify Arduino connection to a network (wired, wireless) "Processing" will do this.

Aha. "Processing" needs a library (called in its sketch) to get Serial to work so it can find the Serial Port and talk to Arduino.

They have a forum: https://discourse.processing.org/

4

Make sure the IDE serial monitor is not open so that Processing can grab the communication line (you can’t have two apps talking over the same serial device from your PC)

5

It’s likely in the code otherwise the processing app would show an error message.

One possibility is that the processing code does not open the right port.

We would need to see both codes …

6

True. I remember struggling to get it working.

Arduino did a similar "comms with Processing"...

Not to replace the "Make:" love counter, but to give another style of introducing "talking to the internets"