As already pointed out, your Arduino is saying too much too fast. Adding delay() will slow it down, but still it keeps yelling at Processing. Ideally, you want Processing to ask for the value when it's convenient, and then receive one answer from your Arduino.

Enter SerialEvent().

As opposed to loop() on your Arduino and draw() in Processing, everything inside serialEvent() only excutes when there is something new in the serial buffer. So instead of Processing asking questions as fast as possible and your Arduino yelling back even faster, they can have a nice, polite (asynchronous) conversation.

Both Processing and Arduino have a serialEvent. This is serialEvent() on the Arduino and this is serialEvent() in Processing. Using serialEvent on both sides, this is what would happen:

1. Processing sends a character to the serial connection. This could be any character, but if we predetermine one we can filter out any unwanted requests caused by e.g. a noisy signal. For this example, let's send a V every time we want a new reading of your potmeter. After the character is sent, we continue our business as usual. Not waiting around for an answer here!

2. On the Arduino side nothing is happening, until it receives data in the serial buffer. It checks whether the incoming character is a V, and lucky us, it is. The Arduino reads the potmeter's value once, outputs that value to serial once, and goes back to chilling out, maxing relaxing all cool. Protip: terminate the value with a character (* in our case). This will help you in the next step.

3. Processing is doing its regular interfacey pixel business when all of a sudden there's a disturbance in the force new data in the serial buffer. It switches to serialEvent(), and start readings the serial data, until our terminating * is encountered. Knowing for sure this was the last character worth reading, we can now store the incoming value in a variable that stores the Arduino's reading.

4. That's it. Processing now knows the new sensor value and carries on with whatever we tell it to do. Meanwhile, your Arduino is enjoying the weather or contemplating its existence until there is incoming serial data.

As already pointed out, your Arduino is saying too much too fast. Adding delay() will slow it down, but still it keeps yelling at Processing. Ideally, you want Processing to ask for the value when it's convenient, and then receive one answer from your Arduino.

Enter SerialEvent().

As opposed to loop() on your Arduino and draw() in Processing, everything inside serialEvent() only excutes when there is something new in the serial buffer. So instead of Processing asking questions as fast as possible and your Arduino yelling back even faster, they can have a nice, polite (asynchronous) conversation.

Both Processing and Arduino have a serialEvent. This is serialEvent() on the Arduino and this is serialEvent() in Processing. Using serialEvent on both sides, this is what would happen:

1. Processing sends a character to the serial connection. This could be any character, but if we predetermine one we can filter out any unwanted requests caused by e.g. a noisy signal. For this example, let's send a V every time we want a new reading of your potmeter. After the character is sent, we continue our business as usual. Not waiting around for an answer here!

2. On the Arduino side nothing is happening, until it receives data in the serial buffer. It checks whether the incoming character is a V, and lucky us, it is. The Arduino reads the potmeter's value once, outputs that value to serial once, and goes back to chilling out, maxing relaxing all cool. Protip: terminate the value with a character (* in our case). This will help you in the next step.

3. Processing is doing its regular interfacey pixel business when all of a sudden there's a disturbance in the force new data in the serial buffer. It switches to serialEvent(), and starts reading the serial data, until our terminating * is encountered. Knowing for sure this was the last character worth reading, we can now store the incoming value in a variable that stores the Arduino's reading.

4. That's it. Processing now knows the new sensor value and carries on with whatever we tell it to do. Meanwhile, your Arduino is enjoying the weather or contemplating its existence until there is incoming serial data.