[Bf-committers] GSOC 2013 Arduino idea thoughts

Arnaud Loonstra arnaud at sphaero.org
Thu May 2 12:11:16 CEST 2013


Hi all,

Just my 2 cents about the GSOC idea of having Arduino's connected to Blender. I couldn't reply to the original thread, sorry about that.

It would be great to have an easy to use UI for connecting the Arduino to Blender however having a compiler inside Blender would be too much I reckon. So it would render having an easy to use UI a bit useless if you have to program the Arduino first. I guess the target audience would be people who already know how to work with the Arduino or the ones willing to master. The userbase of Arduino is huge!

I'm really interested in having Logic Bricks for the Arduino. Arduino's are mostly used for realtime interaction setups (imho). It's used a lot to bridge with physical sensors. It uses the Firmwata protocol * http://firmata.org 
* http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Firmata
Perhaps that's more interesting than Arduino itself?
  
Using them with the BGE makes sense, from building your own custom game controller to connecting scientific sensors. Doing this currently in python requires python skills, especially when doing it non blocking (threaded). 

For use inside Blender I could imagine having a film setup in which light control is measured and/or controlled using Arduinos. This way lighting can be controlled by Blender but also mimicked in Blender in order to get an equal virtual and physical setup. I know this could be done using DMX and Artnet however the Arduino opens this up for low budget setups and custom setups.

But thinking this through... If having a Arduino Logic Brick still requires coding skills it doesn't make much sense. I reckon it would be far more beneficial to have python logic bricks. In the sense of having a way to create custom logic bricks with python just like you can with the new Python Nodes. An Arduino Logic Brick is than easy to implement, and so is an OSC logic brick for example. This would open up the path for more addons for the BGE/logic bricks. If this custom logic bricks thing also takes the trouble of threading away it would be great.

Rg,

Arnaud

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