I’d like to have it automatically switch over to the control signal whenever a signal is present at the inlet — and switch back to manual control whenever no signal is present.

anybody have ideas? all i can think of is taking a constant stream of snapshots, and switching to manual whenever I get a bunch of zeros in a row from snapshot~. Seems like a messy way to do it.

as far as i can tell, the only difference between the presence or not of a signal is whether the signal is a constant zero. constant is practically defined by checkng it over and over without a change, as you describe. you could also implement such a check with delays and ==~ 0 objects combined at an and gate, but this seems even more unwieldly than your suggestion.

a simpler approach might be to have the controlling device send an auxilliary binary signal to the receiver to indicate whether or not it is sending control data. the controller would have to be smart enough to know the difference, of course.

your approach is best when there’s more wiggle room, but in this case I can’t simply add the two streams of control information because that would frequently create numbers that are outside of my desired range…