Making Things Talk

APPENDIX A 347

Figure A-2

The Exemplar interface. You can view the outputs of sensors on

time graphs, filter them, match patterns, and have those patterns

generate messages that can be sent to other applications.

Network, or ACN, which can run over Ethernet. Over the

next few years, you can expect to see it grow in promi-

nence. For more on show control protocols in general, John

Huntington’s book Control Systems for Live Entertainment

(Focal Press, 2007) can’t be beat.

X

Proxies of All Kinds

Many of the software programs you’ve written in this book are basically proxies, con-

verting one form of communication to another. There are a number of useful programs

on the market that convert from one protocol to another in order to enable two devices

that don’t speak the same language to communicate. Here are a few examples.

Network Serial Proxy

One of the most common tasks in networked projects

is converting a stream of serial data to a network TCP

stream. Most developers of physical computing projects

have written their own network serial proxy, so there are

many examples to look at. It’s a particularly useful thing to

do when you want to communicate between applications

that can’t access a serial port, like Adobe Flash, and a

microcontroller. The next page shows just such a proxy.

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348 MAKING THINGS TALK

Here’s a very basic proxy

sketch written in ...