Controlling your MCU

The SCADA interface in Flowcode is powerful - but is limited to Windows PC and has limited graphics abilities (though v10 might change this)

I wanted to control an MCU from a different language - this would allow me to use Linux, Mac or Android devices.

To test the idea - I used an Arduino UNO attached to the PC via USB (COM3 on my setup)

I installed the Arduino SCADA firmware (from Component: SCADA (Arduino Uno) (SCADA Slaves) )

This allows commands to be passed to the Arduino via USB at 115200 baud.

I used Python on a PC - and tested the simplest command - flash the inbuilt LED with a 1s flasher program

import serial ## Serial port routines

import time ## for sleep (delay)

state = True ## led state - true = on

## Data to set a pin - in this case 13 (LED builtin)

pin13 = [58, 128, 13, state, 59, 10] ## Output to pin 13

data = bytearray(pin13)

## Open com port - my SCADA device attached to COM3

with serial.Serial(port = "COM3", baudrate = 115200) as port:

while(1):

data[3] = state ## insert 'on' or 'off' into the command bytes

port.write(data) ## send the command to the serial port

state = not state ## toggle the led state

time.sleep(1) ## pause 1s

Save this code as flasher.py and run using python flasher.py

(Python can be downloaded from Download Python | Python.org)

This 'flashes' the inbuilt LED at 1s intervals.

Then - for fun - I added a 'graphic' display of the LED state on the PC.

import serial ## Serial port routines

import time ## for sleep (delay)

state = True ## led state - true = on

import pygame

## Pygame initialisation

BLACK = (0, 0, 0)

RED = (255, 0, 0)

clock = pygame.time.Clock()

pygame.init()

pygame.display.set_caption('Flasher 1s')

screen = pygame.display.set_mode((240,240))

## Data to set a pin - in this case 13 (LED builtin)

pin13 = [58, 128, 13, state, 59, 10] ## Output to pin 13

data = bytearray(pin13)

## Open com port - my SCADA device attached to COM3

with serial.Serial(port = "COM3", baudrate = 115200) as port:

while(1):

clock.tick(60)

for event in pygame.event.get():

if event.type == pygame.QUIT:

quit()

data[3] = state ## insert 'on' or 'off' into the command bytes

port.write(data) ## send the command to the serial port

if state:

screen.fill(RED)

else:

screen.fill(BLACK)

pygame.display.update()

state = not state ## toggle the led state

time.sleep(1) ## pause 1s

This simply displays a 240 x 240 window - which is red when the LED is on and black when it is off.

However - this technique allows many extra benefits - the user could use Python's extensive libraries to process data from a sensor for instance - or post to a website...

The technique also works for other languages (although note that opening a COM port in C++ is more involved :-( ) - for example MATLAB.

Here I've only shown one command (set a pin) - there are many others available - for outputting data to i2c or SPI etc.