Hey guys I am working on a senior design project and have been advised to use an Arduino Duemilanove. What I am wondering is can I send a signal from my computer to the Arduino and have an LED light up? Preferably through the USB port. There are only 9 available options. So after calibration if the person looks back to the top left of the board, a LED will light up in that corner. I understand how to call the Pinouts but getting the signal there is my concern. Also, if it is possible can it just be put anywhere.
My project uses open source eye tracking software written in C#. The basic concept is to light the LED when someone looks back to a precalibrated position. Any advice would be great. Thanks guys. I really appreciate the help.
Bit of a confusing description... but sounds like all the work is done in the PC?- and you literally want the Arduino to get a signal to switch on an LED? If I were you I'd find an old Centronics parallel printer interface card for the PC and drive the LEDs through that, where you have access to all the pins.
There were only 8 data lines (0-7) but iirc some of the control lines are output too, so you could hi-jack one as your 9th data line.
What I am wondering is can I send a signal from my computer to the Arduino and have an LED light up? Preferably through the USB port.
yes, most or the various arduino boards connect to a pc via a USB port.
So after calibration if the person looks back to the top left of the board, a LED will light up in that corner. I understand how to call the Pinouts but getting the signal there is my concern. Also, if it is possible can it just be put anywhere.
dsmith76:
What I am wondering is can I send a signal from my computer to the Arduino and have an LED light up? Preferably through the USB port.
This is very easy to do and I wouldn't be surprised if you could find examples of serial port handling that already do what you need.
When the Arduino is connected by USB the Arduino USB drivers create a virtual serial port on the PC which can be opened by any application to read from and write to the Arduino. At the Arduino side your sketch just needs to call Serial.begin() to open the serial port and then read commands from it and turn LEDs on and off accordingly. On the Arduino side this only needs a dozen lines of code. On the PC side you just need an application which can open the serial port and write commands to it. It is up to you to define the command syntax, but for something this simple you could, for example, just send a single byte command such as ascii '1', '2', '3', '4' to turn the specified LED on and '0' to turn it off again.