Arduino stuff: Exposing Arduino pins to Raspberry Pi with USB connection

This guide helps you to setup Arduino to talk with a Raspberry Pi, but this will work with any other computer/operating system as long as it has python installed. We will be using python code to send commands with Firmata -protocol to Arduino (Uno) which will have corresponding firmata program running. This guide assumes you have Raspbian installed.

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Setting up Raspberry Pi
Setting up Arduino
Run simple test program
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1 Setting up Raspberry Pi

Install needed libraries pySerial and pyFirmata

 $ cd Downloads/

Next download and extract pySerial library

 $ wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pyserial/pyserial-2.6.tar.gz#md5=cde799970b7c1ce1f7d6e9ceebe64c98  
 $ tar -zxvf pyserial-2.6.tar.gz

Install pySerial and go back to Downloads

 $ cd pyserial-2.6/  
 $ sudo python setup.py install  
 $ cd ..

Install a git client, because we will be cloning pyFirmata library from github.

 $ sudo apt-get update  
 $ sudo apt-get install git-core

 $ git clone https://github.com/tino/pyFirmata.git  
 $ cd pyFirmata  
 $ sudo python setup.py install

2 Setting up Arduino

Connect your arduino and open Arduino IDE. Open StandardFirmata sketch from examples: File>examples>Firmata>StandardFirmata. Upload the code to your arduino, then connect it to Raspberry Pi with usb. Make sure raspberry pi sees arduino: