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Blinky

I received a wonderful package in the mail last Friday, and am just now getting around to playing with it.  Peter Nyboer and the guys from Livid have let me borrow an Ohm64 in order to port the Monomodular stuff over to it.  Its a very sexy piece of hardware, and I can’t wait to be triggering stuff from it in the manner that I’m accustomed with the other controllers that  I’ve worked with previously.

My original intention was to just port over the pertinent sections of Monomod so that Ohm64 users would have access to my patches, but I realized very quickly that things weren’t going to be that straightforward.  After all, Monomodular is centered around multicolor grid controllers, and the Ohm64 is just…well, “blue”.  But that was kinda enticing in itself, since blue is my favorite color for leds, and none of the other c_s’s that I use even have that color (why is it always all or nothing?!).

So my first task was to implement some kind of flashing state built in to the Python script for the controller.   Since I was having to use a lot of my own functions, it seemed simpler to just write a new Python script on top of what I’ve already done for Monomodular and use it for more general purposes.  I thought it was going to be a lot of work (and probably will be, by the time I’m done), but at least the initial work is already done:  I have flashing buttons (which can be set by sending a message between 1 and 126 to set the interval), a session controller, and some other basic functionality working quite well.

I built a new class on top of the _Framework for the button class that overides a few things and adds a few other things.  This, in conjunction with another call from the main class, is all it takes to get buttons with flashing feedback.  This is general, so you can use it with any other Python script that is based on the _Framework stuff.  I’ll probably revise it a little when I have time to figure out how to add an internal timer instead of calling everything from _update_display, but its some good progress, and I think a few people will be really happy about it.

I have another evening to work on this before I have to go back to work, but there should be some new releases here in the next couple of weeks that support another piece of hardware and round out some of the things that I’ve already released.  I’m now trying to incorporate as much as I can into these Python scripts and move a lot of the heavy lifting from m4l over to them.  So far, so good.

~ by amounra on October 5, 2010.

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