Advice about maxhole or other networking solutions please.

    Briggan Krauss
    Mar 26 2013 | 11:01 pm
    Hello I am working on a show where I need to get three, possibly four laptops to share data. Basically just MIDI messages and streams of coordinate data from Kinects. These computers will not be able to be near each other so I have a wireless router (not connected to the internet) which will solely be for networking computers in the show. I'm using "select" and "route" objects on each computer coming out of maxhole to sort through what needs to go where and I'm finding that it is all a little finicky. Sometimes seems to work well, sometimes not so much. I'm wondering if there is a better, more reliable way to go about this either using maxhole (can this be more efficient?) as I am doing or perhaps using some other method. Maxhole documentation seems sparse and posts on the Forum here are pretty old. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
    • vichug
      Mar 27 2013 | 2:02 am
      i'm not sure, but it would seem maxhole is an old thing replaced today by built in solutions : udpsend/udpreceive and jit.net.send/jit.net.receive
    • $Adam
      Mar 27 2013 | 10:05 am
      If you need simply routing, then I would go with the built-ins, as suggested by vichung. If you need more complex live-network-performance stuff, then you should have a look at Quintet.net (http://www.quintet.net), although it might be an overkill for the simple scenario that you described.
      Hope that helps, Ádám
    • Briggan Krauss
      Mar 28 2013 | 5:12 pm
      Thanks for the advice! Quintet.net looks amazing but probably overkill as you say. The udpsend/udpreceive objects appear to add a layer of complexity to everything over the maxhole object which is fine (using them means a learning curve for me) but nowhere does it say what advantages they have over maxhole. I wonder if it would actually be worthwhile to switch over or if I should just continue with maxhole.
      Thanks again,
      -B
    • vichug
      Mar 28 2013 | 9:41 pm
      oh, ok, i see net.maxhole is a java thing that's in any max distrib. Er, indeed it's simple than udpsend/recieve, but, maybe the udpsend/receive are more reliables, i don't know... because maxhole is java, maybe why it can"t keep up with a fast data stream, but maybe my suppositions are just sh*t... maybe try jit.net.send/jit.net.recv, which are using tcp/ip protocol, which is more reliable than udp, BUT maybe it will be worse since it uses more bandwidth... if you want to stick with maxhole (as i don't think any other solution would be as easy as maxhole seems), mayeb post the problematic part of your patch ? but this object, maybe, is problematic regarding efficiency...
      tl;dr no easier solution than maxhole :) if it's not fast enough, you'll have to learn using udpsend/receive (probably the most efficient/easier besides maxhole)
    • Yoann
      May 23 2013 | 9:11 am
      jumping into this thread, because I have "similar" question: about the efficiency of udpsend/receive.
      I have a patch that gets numbers from 20 sensors (2 arduino)One computer  receive the data (20 channels x 10bit x 100Hz) and send them to another.
      I had many crashes on the client side. I can't be sure yet, but I suspect the udpreceive.
      Yoann
    • dtr
      May 23 2013 | 9:36 am
      Are you sending 'm individually or all 20 in one message? UTP, WIFI, firewire,...?
    • $Adam
      May 23 2013 | 9:59 am
      Hi,
      flooding an existing thread with a completely unrelated question is perhaps not the best way to get helped. Also, without more information about your actual problem, it would be very hard to help you.
      With that said, above the questions of DTR, I'd also ask you whether you are sending your sensor data in raw binary or in OSC format to Max?
      BTW, did you search for similar questions in the forum? I recall a few posts in the past (for example https://cycling74.com/forums/best-way-to-receive-udp-data-form-sensors or https://cycling74.com/forums/problems-with-udp-communication-between-max-and-arduino ), but I'm sure there are many more related topics which might give you some initial help.
      Cheers, Ádám