I am trying to find out if and how to create an arduino fio/xbee based wireless network of multiple fio/xbee's? 4 to be exact.

I am currently building a wireless system consisting of 2 "hand units", a wireless mouth interface and a base station xbee interfacing with pure data. www.beatjazz.blogspot.com. i already have the first fio/xbee communicating with the base station and pure data using pduino and all is perfect. this weekend i pick up the other 2 arduinos and fio's. all 3 arduinos need to connect with the pure data at the same time.

the instrument i am building is a wind midi controller except that instead of it being one horn like instrument, allthe left hand keys are in a wireless unit attached to the left hand and same goes for the right hand. the mouthpiece is worn like a headset microphone and is a pressure transducer for breath and a FSR for lip pressure. they must all work together as if one instrument. most of the coding has been done, andnow is time to split that code to the multiple wireless nodes.

it would seem that since all the xbee's have their own id's that that would translate over to the arduinos they are connected with and the whole network should come into the computer thru one serial port, which should solve that problem. I am wondering; how i might interface the 3 arduinos to pure data/pduino? theoretically, shouldnt i be able to name instances of the [arduino] object, say [arduino left], [arduino right], and [arduino mouth] so that each fio has its own instance? if so, how do i recognize the individual fio's and make use of their individual id's if that is the case at all?

Thank you in advance for any insight anyone might share.

Onyx

Saw your TED video, so maybe you've already solved this problem.

In my limited work with getting arduino and pd to play nice, I've found that things like pduino and firmata work great but can be restrictive. I had to multiplex inputs on my arduino, which doesn't play nice with something like firmata that automatically reads all the pin values.

It might be better to have each arduino on it's own [comport], and differentiate the arduinos that way. Dump pin values over each comport and keep reading it.

Here's the thread explaining what I did:
http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-5832-reading-multiplexed-input-streams-arduino

I'm a fan of your work.

thanks! haha, yeah, i solved that problem;-) i did just that; i put each one on its own comport. each one feeds its own [arduino] object and then i combine it all into a single "instrument" from there. it works really well. i have been squashing midi and timing bugs and feel like it is reasonably solid now.

one interesting occurance is that, as you mentioned, its funny about multiple digital inputs which has now become useful. it seems, currently, to register one digital input at a time but if i press one then press another, the last one "sticks" and doesnt shut off til i hit it again. what i've done with this is use this "feature" to latch functions. it's become very useful although i will be trying to rewrite my firmata soon so that i can sijmply do this with my own code.

thanks for the feedback and the kind words.

Onyx

basically