Im working a project on pd at the moment and id like to have live data changing the parameters, from a motion sensor or whatever. Whats the best way of doing this? Also was wondering if it would be possible to use data from online or another source e.g the temperature or the weather in a certain place according to the internet?

Cheers

It depends on your sensors/whatever.

You could get sensor data from whichever microcontroller/microprocessor you are using and send it via network to PD, and receiving with [netreceive] object.

To get values from the internet I would make a script in another language (python?) to scrape that data from the webpage or API, and then route it to your PD patch via network (and receiving with [netreceive] object also).

http://write.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/send-and-receive/

(sorry not to respond to your email yet - I'll respond on here instead!)

scraping data from the internet isn't the easiest thing to do in Pd, in my experience, I think the solution @andresbrocco describes is probably best. It's (annoyingly) easier to do in Max/MSP, but hey.

In terms of sensor data from a micro controller - in my experience the most dependable way is to code a Teensy micro controller to function as a USB MIDI device. You connect any sensors you like to the Teensy, and convert the data into MIDI CC or note values, which can be read in PD using the [notein] or [ctlin] objects. This is a really solid and relatively straightforward method...I have some generic code for doing that on my website: https://www.yannseznec.com/works/teensy-usb-midi-controller-code/

For most things you can just use a Teensy LC, which is only like £12 or something.

The primary downside of that method is that the resolution is quite low, because MIDI is so old fashioned. So it means that whilst you can get 12 bit analog input resolution on the Teensy (values between 0-1023), you have to downsample that to go from 0-127 for it to work over MIDI. so that kind of sucks. However, if you really want high resolution you can be clever with numbers and split them up and send them over several CC controller numbers or something, which is sort of how NPRN works.

Hope that helps!

No worries !
Cool thanks, so the script (made in python) would have to have a line in it where it specified to send the data which it scraped from the webpage specifically to a netrecieve object ? where does this script run? Is there like a python external for pd which it would run with?

and sweet ill have a look at that teensy script, really keen to try and make some instruments that i can physically play with the knobs and switches!

Cheers

You can launch Python scripts (or whatever) with [shell] from the ggee library, unless you're on Windows, for which there's another object that I can't remember.
If you want the sensor data serially, you can also use "vanilla" Arduino code and receive the data straight into Pd. You can either use [pduino] which works with the Firmata firmware, but I'm not sure if the Firmata is actively maintained, or you can use a couple of abstractions I've made for this purpose, [serial_print] and [serial_write]. You can get them here https://github.com/alexdrymonitis/Arduino_Pd

You can also do HTTP requests from within Pd with the PuRestJson library, but it's very likely to get audio dropouts. It's probably best to do this with Python or something similar.

awesome thanks for the help, do you know much about python? I have installed the newest version and some libraries including beautifulsoup4 but i think i may have installed the libraries for the older version of python, as i keep getting this warning in my terminal :
"DEPRECATION: Python 2.7 will reach the end of its life on January 1st, 2020. Please upgrade your Python as Python 2.7 won't be maintained after that date. A future version of pip will drop support for Python 2.7. More details about Python 2 support in pip, can be found at https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/development/release-process/#python-2-support"
which makes me think its the older version?

@djpersonalspace I think that's a question for a python forum, or even StackOverflow haha

But yes, you've installed for old version.... try apt-get install python3-beautifulsoup4 instead of just python-beautifulsoup4....

something like that would work