Not-Fig

In my last post I hinted to the beginning of what I thought was impending disaster.

The original planned setup for connecting physical switches to Ableton Live was based around key mapping. Live quite nicely allows you to map a track/channel to any key (the letter ‘a’ in this case) and this key then acts as a switch. This seemed to be coupled nicely to our needs. The next stage was to get Arduino to send the ASCII code representing the key we had mapped through serial communication. This was a foolproof plan………in our minds. The problem occured when I realised we could get the Arduino IDE to print the key we’d mapped however neither I, nor my group, had the expertise to get Live to believe that an actual key had been pressed. I’m sure this is possible however I did not have the time, patience or know how to do it.

To work around this we have introduced some additional elements to the software side of the project; SimpleMessageSystem for Arduino and a custom patch for Max/MSP. SimpleMessageSystem provides the necessary firmware which is loaded onto the Arduino board and allows Max/MSP to access all the digital and analogue inputs of the board. You can see in the image below the visual representation of the analogue(yellow dots in a row) and digital(inside the blue box).

Max Arduino Patch

This has worked out quite well as Max and Ableton work extremely well together. Yesterday we managed for the first time to create a fully working system, despite it being totally out of the vastly more complex context of the launderette. We have now tested the system with one manual push button switch which has turned on one channel of music from Arduino to Max/MSP and then via MIDI mapping to Ableton Live.

Other members of the group have also today got an infrared sensor working on the Arduino board as well.

Plenty more to do though…….

Tagged: coinlaundry, maim, tech