Does anyone have experience with controlling DMX lights via an Arduino and Firmata from Pd?

I'm using a Duemilanove board plugged in via USB and I've uploaded the StandardFirmata sketch to it. I think Pd and the board are communicating successfully as the debug light flashes whenever I send anything to the [Arduino] object, and I know the lamp is plugged into the board correctly as I uploaded a simple test sketch to make the lamp fade up by itself and it worked.

I guess the only thing I don't know at the moment is the syntax for the messages I have to send from Pd to the board to communicate with the lamp. Also I don't know what mode I have to set all the pins to.

I would have thought the messages should look something like [digital 1 255( which would turn channel 1 (red) up to full, but it's not working.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I'm running Pd 0.41.4-extended on MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6.4.

Hiya,

I'm trying to make a GUI of a piano keyboard using canvases but am having issues making sure that the black keys always appear on top of the white keys - there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how this behaviour is translated into saving/loading (sub)patches or abstractions.

I know that the most recent canvas to be moved/created/pasted will be on top, but this isn't always saved when closing/opening. Is there any neat little trick (or hack!) to define the layer order of objects in Pd?

Thanks for reading!

Y

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/keyboard.zip

Hiya guys,

Wondering if anyone can help me.

I'm throwing the output of a [readsf~ $2] object to a [catch~] in a separate abstraction and I'm getting this error message:
error: catch~: no method for 'symbol'

(The $2 in this instance is in the title of the abstraction)

As far as I'm aware [readsf~] outputs audio rate signal, not a symbol, right?

Other information which may or may not bare relevance:

• The [readsf~ $2] object has a [1 ( message, a [symbol $1] object and an [open $1( message going to its inlet. ($1 in this instance is the title of the abstraction which is the path and name of the soundfile I need it to play.)

I'm so stuck! Any ideas?

Thanks for your help!
Y

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/Pd_error.png

Thanks for this - amazing little patch! Can't wait to try it out.

Haven't ever used an object exactly like the one you've described, above, but attached is a Unique Random Number generator called [c_urn]. It's taken from Rj Lib, which can be downloaded here: http://github.com/rjdj/

I'm sure this will get you a bit of the way!

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/c_urn.zip

Thanks. This is my first video tutorial, but I may make more around the theme of RjDj scenes and reactive music if people are interested...

Here is the video tutorial on this as promised. Turned out being a bit more comprehensive than I first set out to do, so it's in two parts:

Pt 1:

Let me know of any questions!

OK, I've now managed to solve this.

Will be posting a vid tutorial after the break for those who are interested.

In relation to the post above regarding the following error message when launching Pd:

GetUtfFaceName: unexpected nativeName

I had this problem and it was driving me up the wall. In the end it turned out that a desktop Twitter app called Seesmic was renaming or moving something in the font directory (or something like that) so Pd couldn't find what it was looking for. So try restarting your machine and then turning on all the apps you usually use in the background one by one while launching Pd.

Hope that helps.

Alternatively just load samples by pressing 'load' under the sample selector H-radio sliders...