gittery performance

teqy's icon

hi, I have a very simple (metro 200) connected to a button and am flashing it, it appears on the screen to be flashing smoothly by itself.

when i take this simple metro and button into a heavy patch, and view it on the screen, at times when the patch is being used, the button flashes in a gittery way and glitches, similar to the effect when one saves a project whilst looking at a flashing button/led. it kinda pauses and then eventually gathers pace and returns to normal.

I wonder is there a way to prioritise the metro and button to overcome this? Or maybe a metro is not the best thing to use?

thanks for any ideas
: P

Christopher Dobrian's icon
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

A few different points that may or may not be of use to you:
1) For best timing with metro, be sure that Overdrive is checked in the Options menu.
2) Screen drawing operations are considered low priority, so they may be affected by strong demands in other timing-critical areas.
3) The button object has its own built-in on-off flash time that is already pretty close to 200 ms, so the flashing at that rate may not always appear obviously to be 5 times per second.
4) If you want to build your own flashing graphic in lcd, as shown in the example below, you have more control over the flash duration.
5) Screen drawing operations can be rather "expensive" computationally, so you might question whether this particular flashing button is really necessary.
6) A button flashing constantly 5 times per second does show that something is happening at a fast rate, but beyond that, it doesn't really provide all that much useful information. Maybe just a toggle or a LED showing that the metro is on would be sufficient from a GUI standpoint, and would save a lot of screen drawing.

teqy's icon

thank you for your reply. I didn't realise how much processing it took to flash an led/button on screen.

The flashing signal is to be routed to an arduino, then to a control panel. its only flashing so the eye can spot it quickly. when the user pushes the button, the led remains on.

I shall look into the LCD object it looks very interesting .

I think i can make my patch more efficient also,. as its becoming a mess . a tidy up should help. : )

Thanks again : )