Maxuino and a digital potentiometer.

geddonn's icon

Hi there, I am trying to get my head around this whole arduino/max thing and Maxuino seems like the way to go with this.

I want to use a digital potentiometer to allow flexible control over some external sound processors.

I found this on how to control a digi pot with the Arduino programming language.

It says I have to send a two bytes of data to the digi pot signifying the channel number on the digi pot (0-5) and a resistance value (0-255).
I know I can send a value 0-255 with the PWM on the digital outputs but I'm not sure how to send it the initial channel number to control.

Thanks guys.

geddonn's icon
Scott Fitzgerald's icon

Digital pots use the SPI protocol. It is not supported with Firmata/Maxuino. You'll have to write your own code.

geddonn's icon

Oh really? That's a shame. I'm using Maxuino to control several servos at the moment and thought digi pots wouldn't be too hard to throw into the mix.

I guess to use both I would need two seperate Arduino boards now?

Does anyone know of a way to link the Arduino software to Max so that I might be able to create a sequencer in Max that could sequence the values of the digi pot?

Thanks again.

geddonn's icon

So I thought of another idea around this problem. Instead of using a digital potentiometer I could use an LED controlled by Arduino facing a LDR to control resistance.

My problem now then is how to replace a standard three pin potentiometer with an LED/LRD (I think it's called a vactrol?).

Any ideas?

noiseandrones's icon

Appreciate I'm responding to an old post, but trying to do something similar currently, so would be very interested to know if you got ahead with this.

Source Audio's icon

what is the question ?
how to link digital pot or LDR ?
in any case, forget maxuino

noiseandrones's icon

Hi Source Audio,

Apologies - I never saw the reply.

Basically, I want to make Max control a 250K analogue potentiometer. This is to control the level of a contact mic.

Source Audio's icon

if contact mic is input to arduino, you can do level control in the code alone.
if it has to be analog control, then even LDR inserted in series with piezo,
controlled by PWM - LED could do.
depends on LDR type - it's resistance specifications.