Physical computing with Arduino

Physical computing is a field related to modern Do It Yourself (DIY) and art projects. It is based on using sensors and various electromechanical devices together with computers and microcontrollers to create interactive physical systems, such as interactive installations and experimental toys.

Arduino is a popular open source physical computing platform consisting of a microcontroller board, an IDE, and a language for the board's programming. The Arduino IDE is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux.

In this section, we will consider how to read data from an analog input of the Arduino board and send it to our VideoSynth openFrameworks project.

Note

To run the example in this section, you need an Arduino board. We will use here the Arduino Uno (Revision 3) board, but you can use any other one.

We begin with programming Arduino board and then change the VideoSynth project so it will read the Arduino data.