nime: new interfaces for musical expression
a course at my master's program, itp. visit the course website.

aya karpinska
e-mail: ank212 at nyu dot edu

other journals: one || two || three|| four || five || six(you're here) || seven || eight || nine || ten

|| journal six|| 25. III. 03 || construction.

i solved two previous problems, but ended up with a new one in the process. i am temporarily using a paper sleeve to hold the flex sensors, and i taped the two sleeves between the hinges of the box flaps using regular masking tape. i actually get a lovely range of motion - very wide. in addition, i figured out why my flex sensors were sending such bogus data (my range of values was about 14, whereas the ideal is closer to 1024). i was using the wrong pull-down resistors! once i replaced whatever i had with 10K Ohm resistors, i tested my sensors with a very simple program that simply output the values from each sensor - lo and behold, a range of almost 300! and all i need to be comfortalbe with in Max is about 100. fantastic! whoopee! i even attached a switch to another pin of the BX-24 and was able to transmit a third MIDI control value (a simple on/off). here my problems began: i only got the third MIDI control value reading into Max! yikes! after fruitless troubleshooting, i just removed it and decided to be happy with my current setup - two flex sensors sending a nice range of values. but no - i seem to have broken my project! i can't get continuous data into Max! the horror! i am definitely transmitting MIDI - i successfully tried the "Test Studio" feature in OMS Setup on Mac OS 9.2. in Max, my MIDITest patch does show some activity - the control value changes (at irregular intervals, mind you; whereas before i was constantly getting data from one sensor or the other every 500 milliseconds). something isn't right, and almost three hours of trying little trickes and re-starting programs and computers helped me not. despair, despair. i'm going to give it another go tonite, but if in two hours i can't communicate with Max i am going to focus on my Max patch exclusively, and worry about sending data later.
lords of digital information transmission, hear my cry...

** UPDATE ** i learned something important! i wasn't getting continuous control data into Max because i was sending values above 127. MIDI values cannot exceed 7 bits, that is, a maximum value of 127 (if we start counting at 0, that gives us 128 values, which is 2 raised to the 7th power). since i was sending values from about 5 to 300, MIDI just freaked out and thought i was trying to send extra bits. so i scaled my flex sensor input values to a comfortable range of about 60 to 128. all is well, for now.