Jon's dashboard

Thanks Tod ! I made a good progress by improving the code in Max/MSP (notably by using the Lqueue object from Peter Elsea before to send the data to the serial object). Also, since I worked on improving the code, I didn't have any reset... It's very important to lower the data rate as much as possible.

Of course I have already stripped the communicator to the functionalities I need. Concerning the I2C master libraries, would you have a suggestion on another hardware capable of handling higher data rate / see if the I2C has received the data correctly ?

Hi Nicolas,
As you've probably seen from the code in BlinkMCommunicator, it's not made to handle high data-rates and doesn't fail gracefully. There will be an update to it to address this problem around July to coincide with a new release of the BlinkM Sequencer. If you're handy with Arduino, you could also alter the Communicator code to fit your application.

Alternatively, turn down the data rate if you can.

As for the BlinkM address resetting, this is a problem we're working to solve. It's also related to a high rate of commands, but at the I2C layer. It's made worse by the fact that many I2C master libraries (like Arduino's "Wire") doesn't have the ability to see if data was received correctly by an I2C device. For updates on that issue, see this topic.

Thanks for your patch Ben, it was a good starting point for a project that I'm working on. I would like to use the BlinkM Communicator with 25 BlinkMs. I have already modified Tod's program and it seems to work with three at the moment.

But I sometime got a problem. I'm using Max to send serial data to the BlinkM Communicator program on the Arduino but it seems to hang at times... I wonder if it is because of the lack of a buffer overrun routine in the BlinkM Communicator ? Anyone has working routine ? Or should I slow down the outgoing serial data from Max ?

Also, do you have a quick way to set separate address on the BlinkM. I connected all of their reset to the ground... then set an address one by one. But, after some time of experimenting, they all forgot their address and I have to do it again :-(. That's not very reliable if you need to send your work abroad !

A little update:

http://blog.bleything.net/2008/3/23/c...

Turns out it's actually really, really easy!

Add a swatch. Send its left outlet to a "prepend 1 0 4 0 99", and send prepend's outlet to a serial object. For me, my Arduino showed up as port b (send "print" to serial to get a list in the max window), so I set up the serial with "serial b 19200".

Program BlinkMCommunicator onto the Arduino, drop the BlinkM in the normal position, and you're set. It's so easy!

It's definitely possible to use BlinkM (or anything connected to an Arduino) with Max/MSP. Check out the MaxCommunication Examples in the Arduino Playground. The "VirtualColorFader" Max patch listed there is probably a good start.

Basically, Arduino looks like a serial port to Max, and there's a Max object to talk to serial ports. On the Arduino, you can run the same "BlinkMCommunicator" sketch that the BlinkM Sequencer to turn the Arduino into a gateway between Max and a BlinkM.

In the BlinkM Project Gallery, there's a link to Ben Bleything's BlinkM project that works very much like this, but using Processing instead of Max.