Arduino and Visual Basic Part 3: Controlling an Arduino

I am still very new to Visual Basic and I have been surprised at how quickly you can develop working apps. My first attempt resulted in a very basic app to receive data from the Arduino which taught me the basics of serial communication in VB. The next step is two way communication and controlling the Arduino from the VB program. I already have a similar project arduinoBTcontrol, where the Arduino is controlled from an Android app over Bluetooth. So all I need do is tweek the Arduino sketch and recreate the Android app in VB.

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Arduino and Visual Basic Part 2: Receiving Data From the Arduino

This post continues from Arduino and Visual Basic Part 1: Receiving Data From the Arduino

In the previous post we received a stream of data from the Arduino and displayed it inside a Visual Basic text box. This is all well and good but we did not know what the data was, we simply received it and displayed it.

The next step is to send data that has some kind of meaning and display it in an appropriate field. This could be a temperature, a wind speed, a switch state or anything else. In the following example I am using a 1 wire temperature probe (it’s actually got 2 wires…), a potentiometer and a button switch.

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Arduino and Visual Basic Part 1: Receiving Data From the Arduino

After creating the dropControllerBT app and realizing how much easier controlling the dropController device is through the app I started to think about creating a PC app. I haven’t done any PC programming for many years and so I looked at what various options are currently available. Visual Basic kept being recommended for ease of use and quick development. Visual Basic comes as part of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Suite and I initially download and played with Visual Studio Express which in turn lead to Visual Studio Community. Both are free for personal use.

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