I got my shiny Arduino yesterday. The first order of business (after the obligatory “Hello World” led_blink sketch) was interfacing Arduino with my language of choice, Python.
Googling around for python serial led me to pySerial, a cross-platform serial library. I was actually quite suprised that such a wrapper didn’t exist in the Python Standard Library. Nevertheless, I plodded on.
The first order of business was symlinking the default device for the Arduino serial drivers on my mac (for sanity):
sudo ln -s /dev/tty.usbserial-LOTSOFCHARSANDNUMBERS /dev/tty.usbserial. From there I fired up the Python shell and ran the serial hello world sketch on my Arduino:
>>> import serial
>>> ser = serial.Serial('/dev/tty.usbserial', 9600)
>>> while 1:
... ser.readline()
'1 Hello world!\r\n'
'2 Hello world!\r\n'
'3 Hello world!\r\n'Writing from Python to Arduino is simple too. Load serial_read_blink and do the following from Python:
>>> import serial
>>> ser = serial.Serial('/dev/tty.usbserial', 9600)
>>> ser.write('5')Hooray, it worked! Communicating with the Arduino over serial with Python (just like every other language) is a pretty trivial process.
Comments
8 responses to “Arduino serial communication with Python”
serial to ethernet…
Hi. Very nice blog. I\’ve been reading your other entries all day long..lol….
I just got a nokia 770 and I’d like to get the flash player in it to talk to arduino. Do you know how I could go about doing this? It seems like you have experience with both of these devices and would be a good person to ask.
Thanks,
Dave
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[…] I found this simple Arduino serial test script by Tod Kurt linked to by Matt Croydon (original file here), and uploaded it to my Arduino. […]
Great work. These instructons worked for me as well. You wouldn’t happen to know how to send binary data would you?
Best Regards,
Jason
Curious. When I try to pull the same thing off in IDLE (2.6) it causes the interpreter to go unresponsive.
Let’s give it a try running the interpreter in bash… same thing. Any ideas?
The authoritative point of view, funny…
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