Arduino and LabVIEW

[WizenedEE]

Excellent, great job. May I ask what your methods are? I'm just curious. It seems that with 5 ports you could get 32 outputs, but I'm not sure about 256.

[Roger]

It was this that got a train of thought starting:

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Maybe use one DIO to signal when the number has changed and should be read by the Arduino.

Have one of the four lines be a "control" bit: start with 0 (no info forthcoming), switch to 1 for first group of data (the 3 other lines), pause, switch to 0 for second group of data, pause, switch to 1 for third group, pause, switch to 0 to end. (Obviously you could extend or contract this, as long as the last group is a 1, so to loop back to 0.) I could get 9 bits of info, but that didn't seem right. I may make that last bit a parity or check bit "some day". The "pause" would be long enough to read the pins and do one loop of code, but I was trying not to be too cross-dependent with timing. Even at 1/4 second per group, it would be only a second to transmit the info.

I had scribbled the Arduino and LabVIEW code in bed last night, and got half way thru it by the time I got back to the robot, but my lead programmer had different ideas (a piddly 16 numbers - pft! ), so we went his way. Still haven't tested that it really works, either way.