Object Controlling using Arduino

Question

I am working on my project for haptics. For this purpose, the task is to create a virtual finger and control its movement using Arduino. The problem now is that I am using Blender 2.80 and the cannot find a way to control the object's movement using a Controller.

The idea was to get the input from the sensors and import the serial data from the Arduino to python and use his data for controlling in Blender.

I imported the data from Arduino to python but can't find a way for further process. the example I saw used the blender gaming engine, but I used blender rather than the gaming engine.

One more thing to ask

Can we control ojects movement in blender 2.80 or we must use a gaming engine for this purpose ??

Need guidance in both these problems.

Answer 1

If you want to do this in real-time, I would investigate using UDP sockets, as they're fast and cheap.

As a test I created a modal operator who was on a timer and listened on a socket on each cycle.

Unfortunately, my modal operator arbitrarily appears to just stop. But as a quick test, this looks promising.

---

Create a cube. Start this python client (who sends random data).

import socket
import random
import time

UDP_IP = "127.0.0.1"
UDP_PORT = 5006

print("UDP target IP:", UDP_IP)
print("UDP target port:", UDP_PORT)

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, # Internet
                     socket.SOCK_DGRAM) # UDP
sock.connect((UDP_IP, UDP_PORT))


for i in range(1000):
    time.sleep(0.02)
    MESSAGE = str(random.randint(0, 5))
    sock.send(MESSAGE.encode())
    print(MESSAGE)

And run this modal operator in Blender.

import bpy
import socket

class ModalOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    bl_idname = "object.modal_operator"
    bl_label = "Simple Modal Operator"

    def modal (self, context, event):
        if event.type == 'ESC':
            context.window_manager.event_timer_remove(self._timer)
            return {'CANCELLED'}

        if event.type == 'TIMER_REPORT':
            try:
                data, addr = self.sock.recvfrom(1024)
                self.cube.location.x = float(data)
            except:
                # timed out
                pass

        wm = context.window_manager
        self._timer = wm.event_timer_add(0.2)
        return {"PASS_THROUGH"}


    def execute(self, context):
        self.cube = bpy.data.objects['Cube']

        print("creating socket")
        self.sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
        self.sock.bind(("127.0.0.1", 5006))
        self.sock.settimeout(0.18)

        print("adding timer")
        wm = context.window_manager
        self._timer = wm.event_timer_add(0.2)
        wm.modal_handler_add(self)
        return {"RUNNING_MODAL"}


bpy.utils.register_class(ModalOperator)

bpy.ops.object.modal_operator('INVOKE_DEFAULT')