Anybody mess with Arduino or anything, to help with learn programming or relax?

I was going crazy from working on my game and had to force take a mental vacation for the health of me and my company. I got into soldering small electrical devices together, simple devices and whatnot. Then I started looking at Arduino, thinking it might be just as fun as soldering, but also be a sneaky way to teach me comprehensive C++. Anybody learn any coding from Arduino tinkering, or have any thoughts?

 

It's a lot of fun, and I'm building a solar/battery monitoring system with it for my boat. Other than the mental vacation though, it hasn't contributed a whole lot to game dev.

 

My side project right now is home automation. I use Z-Wave. Its really fun. My controller uses LUA as script language.

 

I have done some stuff with arduino's controlling WS2812 LED strips. These can be controlled per-pixel and can create some interesting effects. Have done a room-lighting project for someone's hobby room using this stuff.

Would recommend using Visual Studio Code with Platform IO if your project gets any larger than a hundred lines of code or so.

 

I am working on a serial communication routine that can control Unity through sensors from an Arduino.
Really interesting

Arduino Code:

void setup() {



pinMode(12, INPUT_PULLUP);

pinMode(13, OUTPUT);

pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);

Serial.begin(9600);

}



void loop() {

int SW1 = digitalRead(12);

if (SW1 == LOW)

{

digitalWrite(13, HIGH);

Serial.write(1);

delay(20);

}

else

{

digitalWrite(13, LOW);

Serial.write(2);

delay(20);

}

}


Unity Code:

using UnityEngine;
using System.IO.Ports;



public class Input : MonoBehaviour
{
public float speed;
public float amountToMove;

SerialPort sp = new SerialPort("COM3",9600);

// Use this for initialization
void Start ()
{
sp.Open();
sp.ReadTimeout = 1;
}

// Update is called once per frame
void Update ()
{
amountToMove = speed * Time.deltaTime;

if(sp.IsOpen)
{
try
{
MoveObject(sp.ReadByte());
}
catch (System.Exception)
{

}
}

}

void MoveObject(int Pedal)
{
if (Pedal == 1)
{
transform.Translate(Vector3.up * amountToMove, Space.World);
}
if (Pedal == 2)
{
transform.Translate(Vector3.down * amountToMove, Space.World);
}
}
}

 

I haven't ever messed with arduino at all but it's in my bucket list. Very interesting thread!

 

I think this is really cool.

 

Here is my current project btw (Z-Wave)

 

I've used Arduino's for getting input into Unity and it's pretty fun. Here's a capacitive touch sensor that I made: https://github.com/bryanrtboy/ArduinoSerialThreading


The curve represents the 'kind' of touch, rather than just on or off. This project forced me to learn more about threaded operations, which is really a must when using Arduino's for inputs to a PC.

In terms of fun, and learning programming I had a lot of fun working recently with Raspberry Pi's and openframeworks. What's nice about OF is you can develop on a mac or PC, and then easily port to the PI. I learned a lot about the different video formats required for a low end device like the PI. And, the PI has GPIO pins that can make it act like an Arduino and use sensors.

 

I learned how to program in Python so that I'd finally be able to code for my Raspberry Pi. I'm glad I did, there's a lot more fun stuff that I can do with my Pi now. Also, Python is very easy for even a partially experienced programmer to pick up, it only took about a week and a half of practice for me to familiarize myself with the syntax. I'm planning on cooking up a rudimentary point-and-click framework using Tilengine that I will be able to run on my Raspberry Pi, as well as port to Unity.