Joseph Silvashy's dashboard

Joseph Silvashy gave praise in ThingM on October 18, 2009 22:42:

Great support!

Besides the fact that the BlinkM is an excellent product that is accompanied by some great examples, Tod helped me troubleshoot issues that were not totally related to the BlinkM itself. Awesome!

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 15, 2009 07:11 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

Geez, don't laugh... funny thing about what I did, if you set the fade speed to 0... they don't really change...

Sorry for giving you the run-around, you did teach me a lot though!

Joseph Silvashy marked one of todbot's replies in ThingM as useful. todbot replied to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?".

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 15, 2009 07:06 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

Ok, so I was able to get it to return something with DEBUG on:

Which is pretty good, but It won't fade the BlinkM's I have it addressing the proper one also, What should the "sendlen" be?

startbyte
header
cmdlen:4
got all
addr:1 sendlen:4 recvlen:0 cmd[0..7]:66,FF,0,1,0,0,0,0

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 15, 2009 06:19 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

So I've gotten Ruby to properly write Byte Arrays to the serial device, however I still don't get any response at all from the Arduino, in the format you mentioned see here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15...

But in my serial console I still have the same output as before, no matter what commands I send to the device, I still get no response. After it compiles my serial console `screen` in this case, still shows:

BlinkMCommander ready
or

BlinkMCommander ready
DEBUG
If I'm in debug mode, otherwise I've been entirely unsuccessful at getting any communication with BlinkMCommunicator to work.

Any Idea of how to proceed? (also thanks for helping me get this far, you've been extraordinarily helpful!)

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 10, 2009 07:33 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

Hey Tod, (I know I am slamming you with all this craziness) but I loaded the BlinkMTester sketch on the arduino and everything works lovely. I suppose I'm just sending serial incorrectly, for example in your BlinkMTester sketch you can change the color of the blinkM to any color just by doing "cff0000" or something, and that works great!

I guess the issue is that I want to address multiple BlinkM's and therefore I'll need to use the BlinkM_communicator sketch because I can address many blinkM's via I2C.

How can I get BlinkM_communicator to work in a similar fashion?

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 10, 2009 06:47 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

So I did a little more debugging, and I think I can give you a few more details. When I open the serial monitor when the program is running(with DEBUG) on the arduino I get:

BlinkMCommander ready
DEBUG MODE

But upon sending it something the monitor stays blank and the BlinkM doesn’t do anything :(

I've tried sending it some of the sample strings you had at the top of the sketch like:

{0x01,0x09,0x04,0x00, 'f',0xff,0xcc,0x33}

And still nothing, but when I open the Java App you guys made, BlinkMSequencer, I can play with that and everything works just perfect.

Am I sending serial incorrectly or something?

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 10, 2009 06:09 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

So, I suppose I've figured out a lot, and thanks for the help so far! I guess I just have a simple question, and its not totally related to my original question.

If I'm running the BlinkM_communicator on the Arduino, what would a simple serial string look like that I could send it? umm... let me see if I can rephrase that; If I open my serial terminal while the arduino is running the BlinkM_communicator program, can't I just send {'H', 0xff,0x00,0x00} in the serial field and hit "send"? shouldn’t it run the command on the BlinkM? I must be doing something wrong.

A comment on the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

Also Ben Bleything has done excellent things with RAD, but nothing with I2C that is obvious. I realize you are probably not that into Ruby... but maybe If the library is included I can just run the method I need for the BlinkM to work! [wishful thinking?]

Here is Ben's talk at Rubyconf from 100 years ago it seems:
http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/d1t... – Joseph Silvashy, on October 05, 2009 04:32

Joseph Silvashy replied on October 05, 2009 04:24 to the question "Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?" in ThingM:

oh geez, I didn't even realize that you may not have heard of RAD, http://rad.rubyforge.org/ It basically just does Ruby to C conversion, and loads the program on the Arduino, it has several libraries built in, so you don't have to include them including Wire. Also, someone has converted some of your BlinkM examples to Ruby!

See these:
http://github.com/madrona/rad/blob/ma...
http://github.com/madrona/rad/blob/ma...

Joseph Silvashy asked a question in ThingM on October 05, 2009 03:25:

Controlling the BlinkM with RAD, has this been done properly?

All the examples in RAD related to the BlinkM are commented out, and I don't have the best understanding of I2C. I just want to be able to send commands to the BlinkM with RAD.