So there I was. I'd just got home, turned on my laptop, opened the Arduino IDE and Monodevelop, and then.... nothing. I knew I wanted my PixelBot to talk to the PixelHub I'd started writing, but I was confused as to how I could make it happen.

In this kind of situation, I realised that although I knew what I wanted them to do, I hadn't figured out the how. As it happens, when you're trying to get one (or more, in this case) different devices to talk to each other, there's something rather useful that helps them all to speak the same language: a protocol.

A protocol is a specification that defines the language that different devices use to talk to each other and exchange messages. Defining one before you start writing a networked program is probably a good idea - I find particularly helpful to write a specification for the protocol that the program(s) I'm writing, especially if their function(s) is/are complicated.

To this end, I've ended up spending a considerable amount of time drawing up the PixelHub Protocol - a specification document that defines how my PixelHub server is going to talk to a swarm of PixelBots. It might seem strange at first, but I decided on a (mostly) binary protocol.

Upon closer inspection though, (I hope) it makes a lot of sense. Since the Arduino is programmed using C++ as it has a limited amount of memory, it doesn't have any of the standard string manipulation function that you're used to in C♯. Since C++ is undoubtedly the harder of the 2 to write, I decided to make it easier to write the C++ rather than the C&sharp. Messages on the Arduino side are come in as a byte[] array, so (in theory) it should be easy to pick out certain known parts of the array and cast them into various different fundamental types.

With the specification written, the next step in my PixelBot journey is to actually implement it, which I'll be posting about in the next entry in this series!