ZigBee Wireless Communication and switching video in Jitter

29Mar07

Step two towards my Networked objects final. I had written a little program in Processing to switch between two videos from incoming bytes from an Arduino, but Java just couldn’t handle the switching well enough – lag and sound sync problems. So I switched to Max/MSP/Jitter for the video handling which works great. The serial port being read into Max required a bit (most) of the trouble shooting as it read readily from the analog pins – not from the digital, but all is well that end well.

The way this works is a Sharp IR emitter/detector in board #1 reads the analog values and if a given threshold is reached it lets you know via a LED and sends either a 1 or 0 though the XBee ZigBee radio to another board #2, which receives the data and lets you know via another LED on board #2 lighting up, thus visual feed back that the sensor data has been transferred. Next, the in-coming data received in board #2 is read into my laptop with Max and used to switch a video seen in Jitter through the USB serial port. This uses the p arduinoserialreader from the arduino2max patch. Next, I will be replacing the Sharp IR sensor with a cmos camera and broadcasting out to 5 boards to tell which one to switch the video on the computer and screen it is attached to.

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