gen~ will give you the source…
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Being deeply involved in Max6 tests & programming, I found & read this post in the Cycling74 forums:
http://cycling74.com…ic.php?id=35704
I’d suggest you tout read it asap.
Joshua Clayton (yes, the famous Kit Clayton), which is a programmer guru inside the company, especially responsible of … Jitter (!), wrote an answer which is so important and instructive about the gen~object.
Here is a (secret?) link you’d love: http://www.cycling74…tation.beta.pdf
The beta documentation of the gen~ object.
The Codebox is amazing.
Little reminder about gen~
They define it as
The gen~ object turns an embedded Gen patcher into signal processing routines of optimized native machine code. The Gen patcher can be built from a wide set of low-level Gen operator objects as well as embedded code expressions.
Basically, you patch something inside a gen~ (which can be understood as a subpatcher) and Max6 compiles it.
Joshua explains clearly in which case we can expect HUGE benefits.
If you use a lot of simple objects to handle some tasks, you can expect between 3x or 10x better performances (for 64 sample signal vector … much more with lower signal vector)
That is CRAZY !
Joshua summarizes several cases where gen~ should be considered:
We’ll be working on the documentation and information surrounding Gen to make a variety of things clearer of when and why you might want to use Gen, but here’s a short list:General:
- You want to program visually at a low level while getting the performance of compiled C or GLSL code
- You want to use a concise text based expression language (codebox) rather than visual programming or coding in GLSL
- You want to avoid having to compile separate windows and macintosh versions (and in the future, 64-bit application binaries)
MSP:
- You want single sample feedback for things like building your own filters, FM synths, physical modeling, etc.)
Jitter:
- You want to be able to have a simple way to make use of the GPU for image processing both in visual and textual form
In the future:
- You want to program visually and get output as source code for use in other programs which you are working on as a developer
WHAT?
you didn’t see it?
Ok.
So I have to repeat it:
In the future:
- You want to program visually and get output as source code for use in other programs which you are working on as a developer
THAT is the craziest & the most amazing thing !
It means we could patch visually some structures to perform some tasks, grab the (C++ ?) source code, and use it in Juce C++ to complete some routines in our last VST plugin, for instance.
Sounds excellent.
I’m invited to LIFT11
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I have been contacted to participate to a nice workshop at the LIFT 11 event in Marseille on next week.
I’ll be there on wednesday the 6th, thursday the 7th morning and friday the 8th morning.
Email me and we can meet us there to discuss a bit and have fun
Lift France 11 is a three-day conference about current and emerging use of digital technologies and their effects on innovation, societal and economic transformation. Under the slogan “Be Radical!”, Lift France will focus on disruption: when (high- or low-)tech contributes to redefining a market’s terms of reference, a whole industry, a share of social life, etc. Participants come to better understand the challenges and opportunities presented by digital technologies, to meet the people who drive these innovations, and to share their own insights.
The whole program is here.
The project on which I’ll work is named TOMETTES 2013.
It seems to be a very nice project coordinated by the Ph D Peter Niebert from the Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille
http://tomette2013.n…/TometteIDE.mov
As a geek/programmer, I’m very interested to collaborate and to test it.
I’ll collaborate with Nicolas Chapuis too.
Thanks to Eric Pringels who contacted me about that.
LIFT 2011, what we made!
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Firstly, I have to thank a lot Éric Pringels from marseille2013.org, the VERY official Marseille Capitale Européenne de la Culture OFF because he connected me to the LIFT 2011 and especially to the Tomettes 2013 project by Peter Niebert.
I crossed Nicolas Chapuis too.
I met him this year.
He is a nice interaction designer, teacher and very cool.
We discussed a bit around those embedded systems and especially about the interaction we could have with them!
Me at lift2011
I met Mathieu Caralp, a future PhD in fundamental computer science research.
He’s just a mega programmer/coder and one of those guru making their own … compilers!
He’s also very cool & nice.
Some words about Tomettes
Each Tomette owns a micro-controller from 18F family (8bits stuff)
Each board (1 tomette = 1 board) owns:
- 6 RGB leds (controlled in the firmware by PWM)
- 6 inputs/outputs for communication with the neighbourood of tomettes
Basically, you can assemble a network of Tomettes.
It is an amazing system which can be considered at many scale: individual knowledge vs collective intelligence
Each micro-controller’s cycle, co-routines are executed.
It is “a kind of” parallelism, and can basically consider like that.Each tomette can write messages on its outputs & can read message from its inputs.
Each tomette can light up or down each RGB Leds and with PWM, they can reproduce 4096 colors I guess (2^12 bits coded)
What we developed
I have been invited to test & develop something I had in mind.
I decided to propose a “kind of” little social network model to use & implement into those smart Tomettes.
It is a very nice system to make model like that because you program/code a firmware for each tomette, and you let the system evolve as a whole organism or population of elements.
We decided to modelize the whole system as a big leds array (not considering really the tomette level)
The only tomette level stuff considered was cell in which one and only one character could be placed.
So, here is the model we made:
each tomette is a cell
we place one and only one person in cell, but the cell can be empty (a person = a led lighted up)
each person as some characteristics (current mood, steerability, mood trend)
mood can be 255 values (0 means very quiet, 128 neutral, 255 very nervous)
firstly, we place some person with random characteristics
secondly, those person send a message from their cell to a random neighbour one,
And then, all messages move till they reach someone (else!)
Depending on steerability, current & mood trend, the person’s mood is altered when a message touches it, and if no message touches it since several processor cycle, the trend drives the person current mood to go to nervous or quiet.
The system isn’t completely finished but works fine
The random functions use a pseudo-random system and it will be improved, for sure!
IMPURE, a graphical framework for data visualization
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I discovered very lately this powerful graphical programming framework.
Its main purpose is data visualization.
As Ben Fry defined the data visualization field of knowledge, in order to achieve a whole project of data viz (the short name often used), you have to process 7 tasks:
- acquire
- parse
- filter
- mine
- represent
- filter
- interact
The last step can be put on the side, as some authors made, but I consider it to be a real & strong step in this big process because it provides the human/machine interface necessary & sufficient to people to manipulate/change/alter the filter (often) and makes them better understanding the purpose.
There are a lot of librairies to achieve that on the web.
By using Proce55ing, you can “easily” grabbing data, processing them & visualize them too.
Processing provides a core .jar (BIG java library) but a light IDE too.
You can download it and test it for free here: http://processing.org/download
A bunch of examples are available and there is a strong community too.
In the case of Processing, you have to code using a JAVA overset of the official library.
A lot of functions visualization-oriented are coded especially for you but… in the end you have to type lines of code!
If you don’t want to dive into a code language but if you want to make strong data viz, just make a try withIMPURE
Please, just do it now !
Bestiaro (the startup behind it) defines it like that:
Impure is a visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more. Impure is a tool to be in touch with data around internet, to deeply understand it. Within a modular logic interface you can quickly link information to operators, controls and visualization methods, bringing all the power of the comprehension of information and knowledge to the not programmers that want to work with information in a professional way.
Those folks are clear & precise, they just invite us & provides us a strongly art/design oriented framework to build from light to complex data visualizations!
Basically, it is all about boxes & patch cords.
You probably know Max5, another graphical programming framework with a less precise purpose, but with a so powerful & strong implementation… It is “a bit” like that.
You connect some objects between them and those objects make their job!
The framework is actually supported only for your browser (that is the fate of all applications & software one day or the other).
But it just proves that our browsers are strong frameworks to parse JS & HTML5 & Flash scripts & binaries!
We already knew that, but it is another reminder
The result, at the end of this tree of patched objects, are pretty nice visualization which can help you to analyse data, or to represent them for a public who don’t care about abstract arrays of numbers.
You can check their flickr gallery too.
I contacted them and they are nice & gave me a feedback about IMPURE.
Indeed, I wanted to know more about further implementation & especially about the fact I’d be very interested by a local implementation (I mean, outside of the browser)
As I’m beginning a big personal project about data viz inside an immersive system, I’d be very interested by plugging it to Max5, for instance.
The AS3 under the hood isn’t open-source, but I hope it will be 
Feel free to contact me, as I’m currently working a bit with IMPURE.
And spread the word for them, they just deserve that!
Huge interactive installation project with Max5
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I have been targeted and chosen to develop a big interactive installation in a new museum in Marseille.
It will involve a lot of technology and I’ll develop a “kind of” client/server application using the Max5 framework.
It will involve RFID tags, database connections and probably more stuff we’ll figure out on the road.
