Wednesday, May 18, 2011

MSC Commands From Max/MSP


One of the challenges we faced during The Ascent was dynamically and remotely controlling an ETC ION Light Board via a MIDI Show Control Gateway. We approached this using Max.

The ION Light Board supports a number of different MSC commands outlined here.

For our implementation we originally wished to use 'Set Submaster' commands to control our lighting environment, however we found that the lighting board, for a reason we are as of yet unable to verify, was unable to process these commands. As an alternative we decided to stick to 'Go Cue' and 'Fire Macro' commands.


To achieve this I wrote a Max patch that translates simple Cue and Macro commands in Max to MSC commands to be sent out through a MIDI interface on the machine using a regular expression subpatcher to convert decimal strings to ASCII decimal strings appropriate for injecting into an sxformat object to process for output.


More information on MSC protocol here.

You can check out the Max patch below.

msclighting.maxpat


----------begin_max5_patcher----------
2667.3oc6bs0iaaiE94o.8+.gwVzIKlLq3EcaepAIHKlGZeIO1oHP1h1loxR
tRzSmrE6+8kRT9hrrlvwVxTrfAIwxTTRG98c3gGQS98We+2cyjoYOSKl.92f
eEbyM+knjapJqrja1VvMSVE87rjnhpJNYV1pUzT9j6pOIm9Lu5DehlFCh.EQ
qVmPAejkSA+bzr7LP4UDIN27r75RfN6t7DVJcV1lzp6AZaoyyR4Er+KsrPH5
dmskuNhOaIKcwmyoy3R6F44INOvG6T9AzOn7CL4dGvus8pR2rhklP4UM.3Ak
lsgusXmCezoQqpdzSdWNKJYmsxhqJLa5WdKDOopv+22+ckeJ93tdCAaCcOlh
HNBfvGTvVjxl+UQsRo+49S6.XE.9RJ3CzmXynfG9f3RJKacTNGjMu5bEbQci
xEUGts5GPMqh3fagUjTBawRt.keyIp4s9UUYuMJpzio+hnIrslu6Su+gGpui
bZ71q7NvW1TvqpgrsIv+oz7xq9irznjjut8FDSSXqXbZ9c.Dw+zdJP3Y3p3Q
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X0tpZzuJn1OPBtRs16vu0KFMTI2WjiVbeCCTw3fDsXbHkbRgX8zyOLTIqyQO
DaqmaGK9.8PrHk5RDnGiCpjwgziSmZASf5wmSofIg5gVwJgbg5IRGzSIZUSQ
RfpEn6xMuxBDe7+gEx4Le
-----------end_max5_patcher-----------

2 comments:

  1. Hi, just wondering did you connect your laptop to ION via USB to MIDI connector?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Michael

    Great job on the Ascent Project! Is your Max Patch available to download. The link on your blog page doesn't appear to be working.

    Thanks
    Calvin

    ReplyDelete