Our lab this week was continuing to work with serial communication, exploring a “call and response” system for both sides of the Arduino/Computer relationship. Admittedly, I was getting used to simply spamming the serial ports on all sides. Cleaning up things and creating better habits around this will help for more the more intensive applications I may be creating in the future.
After figuring out the lab examples and tutorials, I had come up with an idea for serial communication. My concept for working with this relationship was to think of the Arduino as it’s own kind of artifact. What if an Arduino didn’t have any other kind of input or output besides serial messages? I did some research and it seems that programs written to the Arduino’s memory can’t have their source code retrieved off of the Arduino itself. What if the Arduino could hold certain secret information, and you could only access it by speaking the correct words through the serial port? If you deleted the original source files on your computer, perhaps this could be a kind of information security.
This sprang from my idea of expanding into different kinds of “call and response” messages. Instead of the suggested “hello” and “x” send and receives, you need to answer a riddle. I used The Hobbit’s famous Gollum/Bilbo exchange of riddles as my set.
Honestly, this is where things seemed to fall apart. I can send to and from P5, I can use DOM elements to type serial messages to the arduino and create text on a webpage. An initializing “Start Game” gets things going and moves onto the next step. But after that inital volley of call and response it seems to get stuck on the first question. I tried re-structuring the conditional statements, playing with switch cases, but haven’t seemed to break through just yet. I’m going to keep working on the general idea though, because I think there could be some promise in it.