9-Axis IMU LESSON 12: Passing Data From Arduino to Python

In this lesson we show how to pass data from Arduino to Python using a Com Port. This is important for our 9-Axis IMU project as we want to take advantage of the processing power and 3D graphics capabilities of Python. Our goal is to get the date from Arduino to Python, and then create a dynamic 3D visualization of our system. The first step in this goal is to pass the data from arduino to Python.

In order to do this, a first step is to install the pyserial library. If you followed our python installation tutorial in lesson 11, then it is easy to install pyserial by just opening a windows command prompt, and then typing:

pip install pyserial

If this does not work, likely you did not install python according to the instruction in lesson 11.

In order to show a simple demonstration of passing data, we can use the following code on the arduino side, which just generates x, y, and z numbers and passes them to Python.

We can grab these numbers from the Com port on the Python side with the following code. Note that you should use the com port your arduino is on, which likely will not be the same as mine (which was ‘com5’).

The above example is just a simple method for passing different channels from Arduino to Python.

 

For our IMU project, we want to use the code we left off with Lesson 10. However, note we can scale back on the number of data channels, because we just want the calibration data and then the final roll, pitch and yaw numbers. This is the arduino code that will pass those parameters.

Then, on the Python side we can grab and parse the data with this code.

In the next lesson we will install Vpython and begin building our code to create dynamic 3D visualizations of our system.