trouble passing serial number into PhidgetInterfaceKit

Folks,
I've been using Max-Msp to interface with Phidgets controllers and it's been working pretty well. I now am trying to interface to 6 different 8/8/8 controllers in a single patch. TO do that. I need to pass in the unique serial numbers of each controller. You can hard code the id directly on the instance call to the PhidgetInterfaceKit call like this

[PhidgetInterfaceKit 123456]
(where 123456 is the unique id for the controller) this works fine

but I want to pass it in as a message... like this

[id 123456]
|
[PhidgetInterfaceKit @id]

but this gives me the error

Invalid arguments.
Usage: PhidgetInterfaceKit [serial] [remote ["serverid" ["password"]]] | [remoteip serverip port ["password"]]

What am I doing wrong ?