Phidgets and TD

Hi,

I am looking at using Phidgets 8/8/8 board for some touch and motion sensors. I used to use a Make Controller board with Quartz Composer. It used OSC as a communication protocol which made interfacing very straight forward but the board could be a bit temperamental.

The Phidgets seem very robust and well respected and I think they would be a good match for my project. The only trouble is interfacing them with Touch Designer. Is the API accessible within touch using tscript or python?

I look forward to any input you might have.

Thanks.

  • J

Hi Guys,

I wanted to follow up on this post. After doing a lot of digging and testing, Arduino is most definitely the way to go for this. Phidets are really quite proprietary.

I’ve found arduino quite easy to use. I have it working using a couple of XBEE radios – just tests sending some simple strings to TD. I’m planning to build a little rig to use an accelerometer to track the movement of a dancer and use this to modulate some animation parameters.

I’m also thinking of building a simple interface for performances that will allow me to simply select to show cues and modulate one or two parameters.\

In any event, I’ll post some stuff when I get it all up and running.

  • J

Thanks justints, it would be great to see more Arduino examples up here! We know lots of people are playing with them and we want to make the process easier for others to jump into to, so the more the merrier. :smiley:

Phidgets has a C API, so in theory someone could create either a TD c++ object, or python bindings, and it might not be too difficult… maybe I should do that. I got a Phidgets kit a while back but I haven’t really used it for much yet.
It is definitely a fairly closed platform, but it’s really simple if all you want is some sensor inputs and you’re working with something that has existing language bindings.

Iam looking for a link to read the output off Phidgets Sensors in to TD.
Programming a scribt in C++ is to difficult for me. Ive try it white out succes :frowning:
So ive someone can help me it would be great.

These are the sensors ive used by Phidgets:
phidgets.com/docs/1067_User_Guide
phidgets.com/docs/3531_User_Guide
phidgets.com/docs/1018_User_Guide

It looks like they have Python bindings too:
[url]http://www.phidgets.com/docs/Language_-_Python[/url]
That may be much easier to work with (and wouldn’t require a Commercial TD license).

Does anybody posted about this any example, working with python? :slight_smile:

I have installed the python module here phidgets.com/docs/Language_ … e_and_Open
and i want to generate an interrupt once an Rfid is read and write the value in a DAT table.
But I am getting a THREAD CONFLICT error.
Any suggestion?

That’s the code running in a DAT text

The problem is that TouchDesigner objects (DATs, SOPs, Components, etc), can only be accessed in the main thread.
Your script is trying to push some storage onto an operator in a separate thread.

For more information and some solutions involving a thread safe queue see this discussion:
derivative.ca/Forum/viewtopi … ing#p19904

Cheers
Rob