Hi - I'm posting to other lists too of course, so sorry for crosspost.

I am currently, among other things (one step at a time), trying to figure out how to control PD via the serial port. that is the question of the hour. just want to use hyperterminal to send a word, like "hello", and have pd do something based on that word, like print hello or something.

for background, the project (due tommorrow, handed to me last night) is:

a button box has 6 buttons: five record and one play. when a child who is
standing between a green screen and a camera (connected to s-video input of
a capture card) hits, say, record 1, a chip inside sends the text "record1"
to a serial output. on the other end, a computer running max/jitter or
pd/gem (probably the former) plays back a set video file (a different one if
it's "record2"), placing it in the fill of a chroma key, and records the
composite of the camera and the fill for 20 seconds, while the kid dances
around in front of the background. if the kid pushes the play button, the
last combined video is played back via the s-video output of the regular
video card.

i don't even have max yet cuz they haven't sent the serial number. so all I
want to do this minute is send the word "play" to PD via the serial port and
have it do something, anything, even just say hello. i'm very new to PD
though. I can get it to, for example, print hello in its terminal. but so
far documentation i read makes me think that the "serial" object only
outputs to the serial port as opposed to reading from it and parsing what
it's getting...