Max Bluetooth and Bytes Cast testing

Thanks for making this work.
I have no BLE unit at hand at the moment, but will definitely be interested
to test and I am sure that many will find this very usefull.

Is communication with midi BLE devices working ?
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Byte cast - also very handy, would converting oposite way be an option ?
float to bin for example ....

At the moment it is just polling of vanilla BLE devices. I saw Arduino BLE capable devices were becoming more popular, but the bluetooth examples haven't quite caught up. All the bluetooth examples I can find are Bluetooth 2.0 based and rely on a Serial RFCOMM interface, which just isn't how BLE works.

As a result, most students give up and move on to using OSC, which is fine. What I like about BLE though is the ad hoc / spontaneous nature of it. I like the idea that an audience member could come along to an installation and interact with it either via an Arduino BLE device or through some app on their phone. There is then an element of proximity involved which adds a nice restriction, but you can keep things entirely wireless. You also don't need a network infrastructure to send messages wirelessly. What you do need is something that will get the numbers from your, or your audience's, devices to where you want them to go (e.g. Max).

Is communication with midi BLE devices working ?

My understanding is that BLE MIDI is special case subset of the BLE standard.

From a macOS perspective you'd connect via:

Audio MIDI Setup -> Window -> Show MIDI Studio (⌘2) -> click Bluetooth icon (or ">>" menu -> Configure Devices -> Open Bluetooth Configuration)†

Then it should just appear as a normal midi devices.

Maybe a [`CABTMIDICentralViewController`](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreaudiokit/cabtmidicentralviewcontroller/) interface for Max may make the experience a little nicer.

For Windows, there doesn't seem to be as easy an interface with BLE MIDI. I'll need to grab a BLE MIDI and have a play around with the framework. My guess is that the connection is permanently kept alive or that it advertises with a 'notifying' property and push notifications are sent out††

What are current BLE MIDI device owner doing to connect with Max?

† so much for the three-click rule

†† completely unverified guess

What are current BLE MIDI device owner doing to connect with Max?

MIDI Berry I assume

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/midiberry/9n39720h2m05?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

Byte cast - also very handy, would converting oposite way be an option ? float to bin for example ....

That's very doable. I assume casting float to it's raw bytes is handy for serial comms, but I believe that is taken care of within the object itself.

What use case were you thinking of?

Mac and Midi BLE is no problem at all-
On windows, where restriction only one app at a time apply to composite midi devices
it might be of an advantage to talk midi BLE, outside of Midi communication.
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float to binary - simply does not exist in max, I once had to help someone with a weird device
using float values sent as binary using sysex messages, had to roll js converter to achive it.

As requested: https://github.com/mhamilt/max-byte-cast/releases/tag/0.1-alpha.2

Direct Download: https://github.com/mhamilt/max-byte-cast/releases/download/0.1-alpha.2/byte-cast.zip

There is an extra example in the ref page to cover the new functionality.

On windows, where restriction only one app at a time apply to composite midi devices it might be of an advantage to talk midi BLE, outside of Midi communication.

I will need to try out the Arduino BLE MIDI library https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/ble-midi/ and see what I can get working.

That's good news, thank you.
but

The numeric types in max (int, float) are always long, 64-bit (8-bytes). The float would be in double (long float) format.

There would need to be some kind of flag added to the `b` mode to decide how the user wants the data to be interpreted.

Suggestions welcome: https://github.com/mhamilt/max-byte-cast/issues/new

or fire something on here and I'll flag it.

Some devices or at least some gadgets made with Arduino use single precision float
like for example buchla.com
They had external that converted float to 4 bytes array which then got sent as sysex via midi to program the Device.
I helped someone recreate that in Max because max external was outdated and undocumented.
Could not match the output till I realised that they used single precision floats.
sysex string using double float to sysex conversion crashed the synth.
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to byte-cast options
I don't know if it would be too much to put that many conversions and options into single object, but if you offer 4 byte float input one should also have it as output option