Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists

Appendix F. Serial I/O

In times past, serial port communication (the colloquial term for the RS-232 computer interface) enjoyed a wide-ranging prevalence not unlike USB in today’s computing world. Formerly used for devices such as mice, dial-up modems, PC–PC networking, and many others, serial I/O is now largely obsolete in the presence of USB. But the basic mechanism of serial I/O, a bidirectional stream of data between two connected computers, has found new life in the realm of physical computing, such as the Arduino platform. In this appendix we’ll discuss functions and methods ChucK provides for interacting with serial devices. When necessary, we’ll refer to Arduino programs as an example of a serial device that ChucK might be interacting ...