Controlling your Arduino Uno board with Python

Today I am going to talk about a particular topic which overlaps Arduino and computer programming.

Last month I was watching video about electronics and thinking about the solar controller which many solar stand alone kits use. For some reason they do not behave as they should (i.e. cut the power to the lights when the sun is rising and give full power in the evening). However, a far more important point is that for this kind of controller a centralized control system is not available. Therefore I had a great idea: let’s try to program a board such as Arduino, to do the job.

I bought an Arduino Uno, the basic model, which I guess is suitable for beginners as myself. You can check more details here.

Arduino is an open source project and can be programmed in a language which is similar to C. This point is fine, since I have some knowledge of C and can get by quite easily with beginner projects. Once the main code has been loaded on Arduino, you can interact with the board through the USB and the “shell”, and, for instance, give instructions to trigger some control flow structure such as if-if else- else. However, in some cases it does not work (still do not know why) or it is impractical, since you can enter only one value at time. It would be nice to control the board with some external tool which could let you write some script to execute. It turns out that there is a module which enables you to do such operations. This module is pySerial. It can be downloaded here and is available for Python 3 as well!

The module is great! It works really smooth and in a linear manner, as it should. However, Arduino accepts only raw bytes and binary code as input therefore some little amendments must be made to be able to communicate with it through Python 3. Note that there are some differences with Python 2 which I will not cover.

First of all, Python 3 wants naturally work with ASCII characters, therefore when sending an integer to Arduino Uno, our sweet board will understand anything but what we have sent. For characters such as ‘a’, the matter is somewhat at ease, since you just need to send the character with a b in front of it: b’a’. On the opposite side, when reading data, you need to convert it into a readable format. To solve all these “problems” I decided to build a simple class which essentially is a wrapper of some functions of Serial and can be used directly to send characters, lists and integers to Python. Perhaps I will add also the possibility to send floats and strings although I am not sure the latter can be send and understood from the board.

Here is a basic example of communication with Arduino Uno through Python 3.

First of all we need to load the following code to Arduino Uno. This simple code lights a LED light according to the value of  readData which is read from the USB port. Serial.print prints out the value of readData to the USB port.

For instance, to control the board in this case, you can use this Python code:

However, writing this code again and again is boring and can easily lead to mistakes. Therefore I decided to built a class whose name is Arduino

By creating an Arduino object using the ArduinoClass, you can call the following methods:

I am also working on a GUI with PyQt4 for this script. I will keep you posted.

The source code of the ArduinoClass is available here.

Hope this is useful!