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Proximal’s Beat Stew is up on XLR8R Nice!

We were running into a weird bug yesterday when trying to poll serial data from one of the new Arduino Megas in Processing 1.2.1. It seems that if you have a lot of code, or multiple tabs in your processing patch, there is the chance that the Serial Class won’t have time to load before it starts looking for serial data in the serialEvent() callback. This led to the program throwing a NullPointer error, and crashing on us until we came across a simple little fix.

Basically we had to add a try{} catch(Exception e){} (**see the code below**) to handle the NullPointers until the Serial class had time to wake up. This was tested to work in Processing 1.2.1, but there may also be another error in 1.5.1 where you first have to update the Java Serial libraries due to a RXTX Version Mismatch. For more information on that see this link. Oh the joys of programming. Hope this is helpful to some folks.

// ==================================== Serial Event
void serialEvent(Serial interfacePort){
 try{
 println("this is where your serial data gets processed");
 }catch (Exception e) {
 println(e);
 }
}