Serial communication or similar

dealerpriest

What options are there for communication between the BBB and a computer? And how hard/easy are these to set up?
Any suggestions are welcome!

My scenario is that I want to read some piezos and do some calculations on the input. In some situations the Bela should send a message to a computer running a java application.

We are a group on a music hack jam and are trying to use the bela together with a Cajon which is fun!

LiamDonovan

Hi dealerpriest

As @thetechnobear says OSC is your best bet, take a look at the OSCClient docs and the OSC example.

The IP address of your host computer is set to 192.168.7.1 by default, so use this address in OSCClient.setup().

Feel free to ask more questions if anything isn't clear!

thetechnobear

Id use OSC, its fast and simple... bela has support, and there is good support in Java etc.

dealerpriest

Will look into that! Thanks!

ncuotto

Hi LiamDonovan,

I am trying to run the OSC sample to communicate with a windows computer connected through USB cable to bela, but the communication is not happening. What should I be running in my computer to be able to receive data from Bela? Any thoughts?

LiamDonovan

ncuotto if you're at all familiar with node.js the example script @giuliomoro mentioned here is a good place to start because it was made to work with the osc example project out of the box.

The node.js script is designed to be run on the board, to run it on your host computer you will have to make one brief change to the render.cpp of the example project, replacing:

oscClient.setup(7563);
with
oscClient.setup(7563, "192.168.7.1");

and in osc.js replace:

socket.bind(OSC_RECEIVE, '127.0.0.1');
with
socket.bind(OSC_RECEIVE, '192.168.7.1');

and two instances of:

socket.send(buffer, 0, buffer.length, OSC_SEND, '127.0.0.1', function(err) {
with
socket.send(buffer, 0, buffer.length, OSC_SEND, '192.168.7.2', function(err) {

giuliomoro

something that receives OSC!
For instance, PureData, Max/MSP and Processing all have libraries to receive OSC messages, as many DAWs do. Also, have a look at the node.js example in Bela/resources/osc (note: this requires some knowledge of node.js )

giuliomoro

Alternatively, there are ways of having Bela show up on your host as a MIDI device, as @thetechnobear found out and details in this post. Notes:
1) this is experimental so we are not able to provide much support at the moment, and
2) for easier development, you would be better of if you could connect Bela to your computer over an ethernet or wifi connection, as the USB connection becomes a MIDI connection. Alternatively, something like MIDI over IP (e.g.: qmidinet) should work, also thanks to @thetechnobear 's implementation of the ALSA API. You would need to compile qmidinet from source and that is not necessarily going to be easy. Also, you would need an IP MIDI driver on your host, but then you would be able to share the USB connection for both MIDI and network.

giuliomoro

The BeagleBone is on 192.168.7.2 (same address a the IDE).

When you look at the networks settings on your computer what you see is the IP of your machine (192.168.7.1 in this case), not the ones of the other machines on that same sub-network (such as the BBB).

jeffd75

Thanks for the feedback (in the meanwhile, I had reached the same conclusions on my own). Osc Communication works perfectly both ways.