As I started working with my shiny new Arduino board I quickly learned how to build basic circuits and program the micro controller to respond to various stimuli, but what really interested me in the technology was the ability to send information between the board and a computer. I’ve done a fair amount of programming in Processing and was excited to bring some of my work off screen. There is a nice script on the Arduino site on sending data from the board to a computer to control elements within a processing sketch. Unfortunately, the reverse is not as well documented.
I needed a script to send multiple variables from Processing to an Arduino to control a few components. After a bit of research, and more trial and error, I put together a script which controls the brightness of three LED’s through a virtual interface on a monitor. Here are my scripts and the circuit I came up with. It seems simple enough to me but if anyone has suggestions I’d love to hear them.
Here three color LED’s are connected to pins 9, 10, and 11 which can use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to control the brightness of each LED. They are connected to their respective pins through appropriate resistors and also connected to a grounded row in the bread board. In the image I am using the prototyping shield from Adafruit which makes it easy to build small circuits.
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