Syvo3

A few weeks ago I ported the Firmata library to Lua, as a first step of an experiment of a DIY Arduino Yun. For several reasons I had to postpone that experiment (reasons being writing my Ph.D. thesis, and the fact that the Carambola board has the wrong pin distance to do anything good with it), and now I have an Arduino Yun, which essentially is a Carambola done well (and I couldn’t expect less by the Arduino people).

So, the next step is to run my Erlang framework, ELIoT, on it (the fact that the Yun has double the internal flash memory of the Carambola and support for external SD cards is simply great), and to interact with the microcontroller (the usual Atmega 32u4) I needed a porting of Firmata to Erlang. The Yun team gives you a Python library for intercommunication, but since it is not C/C++ I couldn’t make a wrapper to an Erlang driver, so I decided to go (Erlang) native.

Thus, meet the library: as before, it is a simple port of the Java Processing one, meaning that it supports only analog and digital write/read operations, among the other operations of Firmata. I have tested it on the Arduino Yun: the Atmega 32u4 was running the Standard Firmata sketch, and a computer was running Erlang and the library (I still have to install Erlang on the Yun microprocessor itself), and it works, at least with the usual simple test of enabling the integrated LED and read from one of the analog sensors.

The library itself is structured as a gen_server: just one instance each time, of course.

*** UPDATE ***

Now the library works in both push and pull modes: a client can query the server to obtain the current values of sensors, or it can receive the updates directly from the server by subscribing to a specific (analog or digital) pin.

Beware that the latter will generate a new update message for each Firmata update from the Arduino (for example, the StandardFirmata sketch running on my Yun produces about 50 messages per second, one update every 20 ms). You may need to filter these messages, e.g., taking action when a certain threshold between consecutive values is exceeded.