We have successfully installed the pyFirmata firmware in the Arduino board. Now, we can control our Arduino using Raspberry Pi.

For demonstration we will blink and fade an LED on the Arduino by writing python codes in Raspberry Pi.

Code Explanation

For coding part, you should read documentation of pyFirmata for better understanding. We will use pyFirmata functions to write our code. You can find pyFirmata documentation by following the link.

So let’s start writing the code

Open your favorite text editor on the Raspberry Pi and import pyFirmata library.

import pyfirmata

Define pin on the Arduino to connect the LED

led_pin = 9

Now, we have to write serial port name on which Arduino board is connected using pyfirmata.Arduino() function and then make an instance by assigning port in board variable.

board = pyfirmata.Arduino("/dev/ttyACM0")
print "Code is running”

In while loop, make led pin HIGH and low using board.digital[].write() function and give delay using board.pass_time() function.

while True:
    board.digital[led_pin].write(0)
    board.pass_time(1)        
    board.digital[led_pin].write(1)
    board.pass_time(1)

Our code is ready, save this code by putting .py extension to the file name.

Open command terminal and type python blink.py to run the code on the Arduino board. Make sure your Arduino board is connected with your Raspberry Pi board using USB cable.

Now, you can see Blinking LED on the Arduino board.

Complete code for blinking LED using pyFirmata is given at the end.

Fading LED on Arduino using pyFirmata

Now, we will write code for fading the LED to make you more familiar with the pyFirmata functions. This code is easy as previous one. You have to use two for loops, one for increase brightness and other for decrease brightness.

In this code, we have defined the pins in different way like led = board.get_pin(‘d:9:p’) where d means digital pin. This is function of pyFirmata library. Read the documentation for more details.

Complete code for Fading LED using pyFirmata is given at the end.

Now, you can add more sensors to your system and make it more cool, check our other Arduino projects and try building them using Raspberry pi and python script.