PIR to Arduino to MAX to MIDI to CV to Pneumatics? Yep, that's how we roll.
So this is a dragnet post for any and all suggestions. I'm not a great Max user, but I've been at it a few months. My group just took an installation commission, and I decided it was the kick in the pants I needed to get down to nuts and bolts in Max. At the top level, I'm looking for suggestions on an easily tweakable MIDI interface for a runtime setup. Now the specifics: I'll be using three passive infrared senors as a trigger into maxuino, which will then be turned into MIDI information from the binary values 000 through 111 to trigger various 'scenarios' from the installation. Each scenario will have a blend of prerecorded stuff coming from an sfplay object, as well as a seq object going out to a Highly Liquid board which will turn the MIDI messages into control voltage, which will then trigger relays, which will then turn on pneumatic valves which will then move very large pieces of metal. This all needs to run on a MaxRuntime program, and the physical movements need to synch pretty closely to the sound files. Here's my dilemma: as you can probably guess, I have some definite latency issues at the relay/pneumatic stage of the chain. Each valve and actuator will have it's own timing idiosyncrasies, and it will change as the installation moves from the build shop to the gallery because of differing lengths of pneumatic hose. As usual, I will probably be up all night prior to the opening programming all this stuff, because Murphy's law says you never have enough time to get this stuff done. I need some ideas on how to setup an easy piano roll style MIDI control in max that I can easily and quickly nudge stuff forward in partials of a second in order to line up the movement with the music. The installation has three different parts, each with it's own particular movements. I was hoping to modularize the patch with the main control being the maxduino and three identical modules running the parts. I'm chasing both the multislider and the matrixctrl around right now seeing if I can get it to work. Show opens in September. I know this is pretty broad, but I'd like to hear anyone's suggestions, thoughts, etc.
Ok, before I get yelled at, I did just find the detonate object. Still would like to hear anybodies thoughts.
L
Hi
despite citing Murphy's Law, it sounds like you're fairly on the ball as far as required Max objects goes, perhaps posting a commented patch would help enlighten us as to more specific requirements.
I'm only truly replying because I'm very interested in your installation description and would love to know more; links etc?
Brendan
Thanks for your interest Brendan. Sorry for the slow reply, holiday week and all. You can look up other stuff I and guys in the group have done here http://www.youtube.com/user/apetechnology?feature=results_main. The project we're working on is a quasi-religious alter made of four junk cars and other odds and ends. The cars have to interact with the audience and each other in a 'lifelike' sort of way, including being synced to the music. Doors slamming, lights turning on and off, bouncing up and down, generally rattling, etc. It's for an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Here's the patch so far, I've just finished the top level control, now I can start working on combined sfplay and seq modules for each of the eight scenarios. The zero-th scenario will kind of be a baseline quiet composition probably run by a few drunk objects. I can't take credit for this, there is a lot of stuff I just straight lifted off of other peoples patches, like the binary to integer converter and of course the maxuino interfaces.