[PD] Where to find comprehensive documentation about Firmata

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

On 06/06/2011 11:26 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> See the functions in the Arduino reference:
>
> http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/HomePage
>

As far as I understand, those functions and their pin modes are not 
directly related to Firmata's pin modes.

The function pinMode(), for example, has only two modes, INPUT and OUTPUT.
On the other hand the Firmata message that sets the pin mode can set it 
to input, output, pwm or servo (I may be forgetting some), where pwm and 
servo don't correspond to modes of the pinMode() function but rather to 
calling other functions (or a series of function calls to set up a pin 
to work in a given mode).

As far (again) as I understand the Standard Firmata is a firmware with a 
given behavior, which is something more (or at a higher level) than a 
1-to-1 map to given functions of Arduino's programming language, and my 
question was where is that behavior documented in some detail.

I see an arduino with a Standard Firmata firmware as a machine that has 
a given (expected) behavior, and I wonder where I am supposed to find 
detailed documentation of that behavior. Or I see it as a machine 
implementing an API, and then I wonder where that API is documented. If 
all the available documentation is at 
http://www.firmata.org/wiki/Protocol then I guess there's still some 
work to be done.

If the Firmata protocol was just some sort of wrapper around Arduino's 
functions (that is, each given Firmata message corresponded to a given 
Arduino function and had the same parameters) then i would be able to 
find all the details in the documentation of Arduino functions, but that 
is not the case....

Maybe the documentation I'm looking for simply doesn't exist (yet) 
because the information i would expect it to contain is probably rather 
intuitive/obvious for someone who already knows all the internals of the 
Arduino. I simply thought that couldn't be the case, because there are 
so many implementation of "the other side of the API" (i.e. software 
libraries talking TO the arduino that is running Firmata) that I thought 
it would be impossible for anybody to have written any of them if the 
arduino's behavior (or the API) wasn't thoroughly documented.


Thanks
m.