Touch board bare conductive

[armin]

any chance to change the sensitivity or threshold of input pins on a bare conductive touch board from vvvv via firmata? i know it is possible in arduino but i would like to talk direct from vvvv to the board. cheers, armin

[robotanton]

Hi Armin,

correct me if I’m wrong:

1. You have this Bare Conductive Touch Board and it has a library / firmware examples for Arduino.
   Right?

2. This library has a function to set the sensitivity or threshold of the pins.
   Right?

Using the FirmataBoard (Devices) node out of the box is not possible, because the Bare Board has to be flashed with the StandardFirmata firmware, but the Bare Board has its own code running.

So you need to modify the Bare Board’s arduino code in a way, that it can receive values from vvvv and use it for the function to set the sensitivity of the pins.

• You can send/receive the values directly via ComPort like in this example from the /girlpower folder in your vvvv installation: IO/Arduino/Arduino_without_Firmata.v4p

• Or integrate the Firmata library into the Bare Bone’s examples to receive the values from the FirmataBoard node. Maybe @jens.a.e can say something here about integrating Firmata?

[jens.a.e]

Hi Armin,

Anton is right, one would need to write specialized firmware for the Board; which is totally possible but might not fit your use case. Also, a quick search on the internetz revealed no one was kind eniugh to write a straight Firmata for the Bareconductive Touch Board :-( As of no spare time at the moment, me neither can be kind enough to do so, despite the interesting challenge…

Nevertheless, there are two option imho you could further pursue:

• Use the Touch Board with the MIDI_interface_generic example code and hook onto it and, well, extend it to be abel to send MIDI to the board to set the sensitivity of the pins (MIDI Control or even better MIDI SysSex messages would fit the purpose)
• Write a custom firmware using Firmata as a transport protocol. Firmata is very well suited for this kind of task - one does not have to worry about the encoding and encapsulation of the data and - more importantly - does not have tediously deal with string parsing on the arduino, which also results in bad performance rather quickly.

For custom Firmata firmware and VVVV take a look at the links with examples from the NODE workshop and another in the forum of our lab:

• https://github.com/jens-a-e/aaaarduino-workshop/tree/master/workshops/node17 - Take a look at the 03_advanced example with the regarding Arduino code (this repo is also the archive of all vvvv arduino workshops I am running)
• https://github.com/muthesius/vvvvirmata-simple-encoder/ - A stripped down very simple example on how to transfer values from a board to vvvv
• https://prototyping.muid.sh/t/werte-von-arduino-nach-vvvv-via-firmata-einfach/275 - The original forum post for the above repository

If you are takign off to write firmware, a quick tip is to note, that you would have to define callback functions when one wants to process received data on the board - just a heads up. Please ping, if you have further questions. Or, maybe you can join one of the repos to extend the code for a sedn and receive example :)