Our current mission was to build a custom input controller for our Smilie-O-Mat. We started with a variable resistor and connected it to the Arduino—an AVR microcontroller development board. Arduino is programmed in C++, but the API is very similar to the Processing language, and the Arduino IDE uses the same framework as the Processing IDE. We created a program in the Arduino IDE that reads the value of our resistor and sends it to the computer via a serial port. On the Processing side, we used the serial library to read the messages and display them.
In the second task, Building your controller, we created a prototype of the controller by connecting three variable resistors and a button to a solderless breadboard. We created a simple protocol for the messages we send to the computer, which allowed us to send the value of the input and also which controller has changed. The button sends a click message to the computer every time the push button's state changes from pressed...