Paring Arduino I/O with Unreal Engine v4

anonymous_user_1b674e2e · February 7, 2015, 6:47pm

Hi,

This is my first post. The context of the problem I am facing is that I am an experimental psychologist and I am attempting to learn Unreal so I can develop immersive environments so I can run psychological experiments in them. The issue I am currently facing is that I want to pair an Arduino board that controls voltage output to a thermal pain stimulator. The stimulator will also have an input back to the board that reads its surface temperature. The issue I am faced with is how to control the input and read the output of the Arduino so that I can control the stimulator. The idea is that events in the game will trigger the thermal pain stimulator. I have done some looking online and in this forum and it definitely seems possible (perhaps through a windows thread) through the serial port. Does anyone have any input on how to get this project working or specific resources that I can check out? I have some moderate programming skills, unfortunately not in C or C++. So imagine there is going to be a learning curve here but I am cool with that. I just need to figure out where to start.

Thanks,

SaviorNT · February 8, 2015, 5:14pm

Start here: Arduino Playground - CPPWindows

The link above uses VS 2008, however, you will need VS 2013 so that you can use it for UE4 as well.

catalejo · February 8, 2015, 6:06pm

Also another possibility would be to communicate with the arduino using OSC messages, there is a plugin already that works well
here
://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?49627-Plugin-OSC-for-UE4&highlight=osc

of course direct communication would be nice but if you wanted to start prototyping, OSC is pretty robust… i recently did a project where we sent OSC messages (floats) to a robot - wireless using xbee-so the robot could talk.

but in any case an arduino plugin would be great, i will start following this thread

anonymous_user_1b674e2e · February 8, 2015, 11:04pm

Thanks catalejo. I really like the OSC idea. That like a plausible and readily implementable idea. I’ll keep this thread updated.

anonymous_user_1b674e2e · February 8, 2015, 11:17pm

I further found this website for working with the OSC on the Arduino helpful. http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/oscuino

If anyone has other good resources for working with OSC don’t hesitate to send them my way.

zoombapup · February 9, 2015, 11:23am

Check your forum messages .

anonymous_user_a8ac95c8 · March 28, 2015, 5:52pm

Hey, was wondering if you had any luck getting UE and arduino talking, trying it myself now and getting lost a bit, thanks!

anonymous_user_1b674e2e · March 28, 2015, 7:32pm

p_cat not quite yet I have had to put the project on the sidelines as I push through some more immediate projects. I’ll probably be able to resume in May.

anonymous_user_a8ac95c8 · March 28, 2015, 7:45pm

Ahh cool , thanks for the reply, i am gonna try get something working and ill post anything i get working.

grizly32 · May 1, 2015, 5:45pm

Hey ,
Just wanted to let you know that I just released a UE4 to Arduino plugin if you still need that functionality.

You can check it out here
://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?68643-UE4Duino-Arduino-to-UE4-plugin-Release!

anonymous_user_1b674e2e · May 1, 2015, 5:52pm

Oh wow this amazing!!! Thanks!

anonymous_user_1b674e2e · May 7, 2015, 12:41pm

Here is a video of the the servo control circuit being controlled by Arduino which is receiving input when the character enters trigger boxes in a first person shooter environment. The setup was remarkably easy. I am still in development noxious pain stimulator but that should be coming on board in the next 2 months. Thanks Fusionlabz and grizly32!!!

://youtube.com/watch?v=W8voGeNs4iY