Headband Work Log - A Single LED Turns On

So! Progress has been made! I didn't expect this, but here we are.

The COM11 thing is resolved - Device Manager turns out to be remarkably intuitive and powerful, and let me reassign whatever-the-fuck it was on COM5 to COM11, and COM5 has now been set to be my Arduino board. So that's happy, even if it is a gotcha for running on any other machine. But fuck it, there's only one headband, how much can portability matter? (I fully expect to eat these words)

The other problem was Mono hating to do things with this Firmata library. My first thought was "Fucking threads, how do they work?". After understanding them a little more, I concluded they were most likely not to blame. Instead, I decided to blame it on Mono's SerialPorts module sucking big floppy donkey dick. More precisely, asking for port.BytesToRead on Windows will crash your program. Luckily Unity's crash report contains the Editor.Log, so I could painfully add debug statements and narrow down the problem. Then followed rewriting of the Firmata library code I had scavenged before. Before, the code was like this:

while(port.isOpen){
	if (port.BytesToRead){
		lock(this){
			int data = port.ReadByte();
			//do a buncha stuff with data
		}
	}
}

Now it's like this:

while(port.isOpen){
	lock(this){
		try{
			int data = port.ReadByte();
			//do the same buncha stuff
		}
		catch(TimeoutException) {
			continue;
		}
	}
}

(modified Firmata.NET)