#44

Check out first message in this thread for instructions.

#45

do you mean no startup pattern even? a little light blink on powerup? e-mail info@monome.org

#46

Hi tehn,

must have type the command to remove old FTDI driver wrong the first time I tried. Once I had removed the old driver. Things improved a bit - managed to get EDW working after a fashion but I imagine there are some incompatibilities with latest arcs. The max patches are only intermittently picking up the presence of the arc - Iā€™m sure Iā€™ve seen some other folks reporting a similar issueā€¦but i suspect this is a mac issue and not the arc itself which iā€™ve now seen working, albeit briefly - if someone could point me at a fix for intermittent device recognition iā€™d be gratefulā€¦and yes three or four leds do light up briefly on connection to mac. will fit ansible in isms at weekend and give this a try - i am fully expecting this to work now.

#47

unfortunately the FTDI / serialosc detection has been flaky in general. iā€™m investigating whatā€™s up. for now, reloading the patch is the best i can suggest. os and driver updates are difficult to keep up with.

#48

Looping back to issues with electric dharma wheels, I havenā€™t had time to dig deeply but from a quick glance at the source Iā€™m struck by a few things.

First off, the way that ring updates are sent to the arc could be easily streamlined by moving to using a map instruction rather than sequences of sets.

Screen Shot 2016-10-06 at 5.15.03 AM.png966Ɨ266 29.5 KB

Next, as @tehn pointed out elsewhere, arc updates could be batched up and sent less frequently.

My gut says that these two things would get us a long if not all the way there (but thatā€™s assuming Iā€™m right that the root of the problem is an arc overwhelmed by storms of updates).

But this brings up a couple of questions:

  • Has anyone tried this on an older arc? Iā€™m curious if thereā€™s any difference in between how the HW implementations buffer and respond to update requests. @tehn?
  • Has anyone tried this on older versions of Max? (Iā€™ve only tried it on Max 7.) Iā€™m wondering if anything significant changed in JS support that may explain anything. Note that serialosc in Max depends on a nice bit of javascript and as discussed in another thread, it looks like Cyclingā€™s treatment of JS has gotten less preferential since Max 5 ā€” e.g., low-priority thread execution only.
  • Non-OSX? Iā€™m on 10.11.6. Not sure if that has any bearing.
#49

this is quite possibly the issue indeed. i can do some different stress tests on the arc.

1 Like
#50

That would be awesome! Let me know if I thereā€™s anything I can do to help.

#51

As a heads up, a lot of code in the arc-howto patch in the official package could use a lot of optimization. This will lead to better third party code.

The ā€œp accumā€ patcher is the most suspect.

  1. Spaghetti Cabling
  2. OSC addresses donā€™t actually update the Arc.
  3. Unnecessary pack call before a message without variables.
  4. There should be a ā€œchangeā€ call before the Arc messages. The current ā€œchangeā€ call is fine, but if someone edits the code for different precision levels (like I did in ā€œcapstarcā€), this change is a good safety call to have.

Hereā€™s the updated ā€œp accumā€:


----------begin_max5_patcher----------
874.3oc4X0saaBCE95To9NXg1tYJK0+.DX2sGf8DLMU4.tstBLQfSW5p169L
1gDRZJ1KAHcZ2fkO.9b9974O6Wt9pIdKJVyp7.eA7cvjIunjLQKqVxjFAS7x
oqSxnU5OzSv9YwhG8lt4cR1ZoVdxCTw8rsxWRkIOvE2eaIKQZzPLYFbJffBm
ECwQD7TPfesDLdFD7ileTrJuXkLiI0pizHtR9bFSqncpnjUwDRpjWHZoFLFd
ndzBfs0xcEBYE+W5UDozeibipkOujYVLk1.dbgrYX+UPPyM1zWEozLF3aEhB
uV.gKZvApQJOU+CJJ7yHOsree8U0ipgoNuIXLytHaE5UX1OPOfCZd9V7LrCd
1JPh19oIE44Lgwg3zQmVacBNezr.k6iaXC0A1d898dqxNbCOBtmO53Vi0KMr
C6YXmyppnsRcrMkxM4p3ob1MkJV3FZVF.BfcQODnIxOFtMxGghskhoKdx8zD
mZhA7QHXB9zIySO8rw4BiP8T542CoXIv9mIk.NXgC04782RjDnMhD2GD4FRb
gZmtWYQbT+yhUflnatvNYtoNVDwFO1UcrG3ooLwdf7sn1dfyB6eN6ifPe6bE
NJdmi23j86bBaOVBPbvPWMohIUUS9.Rk0ygP41ET7m+uWAEr+Y3LtJeAqzdg
CTXq95Oq7cKokJzJYk2xDzEl2BOopJ8elPR+GU+I.ZlCzKAO1Q02kUP623ZT
7v6GF+efaHJZHZqYAfamdI6nW6YB6ktZzr2Pb76AnBMMIYUtcRLL3ufDu3Un
IGi7dUEZyp6kwEu5Fkz7P8KNfRqJVUlzXglaDYJnEOjxpjbg99cZ8QptQ26q
10V2V3mxqpiX0lK7s2jc1tT8i3fggFe6x2IBKbzML0IX6GCKmmtrP47V0bB+
35K9w2GoqIBwam0RW8MIW6ugrgkCQrcrfPjZqmDg04UMHSOafwh88E+Q2gYt
SAXw6uS3.GGXbTv5NlTmHOXyjgihCcBIWfPRnKFVz6T65vLv125w5MabDrUl
B8rAL5h3BTNDvi.GqCbrywjw2vhbNtejML2BiCtLFFxICCMtFla8HcdIX1zj
Ic4xmXkUaVZiMoZP+whx54ymZlyEl4lSg3Uxdh27KAFQzRU+4RUy4qJM8But
4B17xKRYkhUbcm0JIZaP83O.4EAXU.
-----------end_max5_patcher-----------
3 Likes
#52

Itā€™s here and working fine. First experiments although Arc has been here for a few weeks. Today with Ansible and Dual Looping Delay from 4ms.

9 Likes
#53

Now that they are out there for some weeks - how is the overal experience of the new Arc?

Are they working with the actual software (Max, El Capitan)?

What about the Ansible/Arc modes?

What are you doing with yours?

Itā€™s a little money to spend and it seemed that minor difficulties have occured in the beginning so while Ansible is on its way I am still hesitating with the Arcā€¦

#54

in my experience, thereā€™s not much software that works with the arc. most extant apps were coded in the golden days of the push-encoder version, and havenā€™t been updated for the pure-encoder series.

it works much more consistently with the module, but so far there are only two ā€œappsā€ for it.

1 Like
#55

Donā€™t forget Orca. It makes nice use of the arc to control various preset settings.

#56

Yesā€¦itā€™s justā€¦I had to sell the White Whale to get Ansible so the Orca seems to have submerged for now.

#57

I love the arc. I coveted one for a long time and jumped immediately on the pre-order. No regrets!

Works with Max 7 and El Capitan for me . Though I concur w/ @ioflow that the existing apps are a mixed bag

I chalk it up to

  1. general staleness and design (e.g., depending on push-button support) and possibly more significantly
  2. changes in Max JS support that impact performance of patches that donā€™t have some kind of rate-limiting of ring updates

Neither of these problems would be hard to tackle and if thereā€™s sufficient interest, Iā€™d be up for pitching in. That said, maybe more exciting would be an entirely fresh round of apps. (Consider this a call to arms!) Do you know any Max?

Iā€™m crazy about cycles. Worth the price alone. Levels hasnā€™t clicked for me. I got started playing with writing a simple CV recorder but got distractedā€¦

3 Likes
#58

Thank you ppqq for the detailed reply!

Knowing that it works with El Cap and Max 7 is a good start as it read a bit as if there were serious connection issues from the previous thread history.

I donā€™t think that I have practical experience with Max - I occasionally have watched tutorial videos while contemplating if I should get into it and I remember downloading a trial on some point in the past and might have done some simple first steps with it. It seems pretty straight forward (yet cimlx when you get deeperā€¦) and getting an Arc could be a starting point for me to get into it. Though it also seems that programming something to make use of the Arc is a bit steep for a first encounter. And I am still learning to get more fluent with teletype in parallelā€¦

I can see getting crazy about cycles. In fact I already am a bit. It just looks so natural and intuitive to work with it as if I always had wanted something like that as an controller for things like timbre, timing, effectsā€¦everything.
I am just struggling hard justifying the expense of 1.300,- for a quad LFO - as great it is. So it would be nice to have some already working computer use cases like the hopefully forthcoming TPV2, some granular or drama wheel fun stuff to explore. Using both, the grid and the arc, in parallel could surely compensate the lost push encoder.

I might not have fully understand levels from the distance but to me it seems more as a starter for those getting ansible and an arc without already having a grid. Provided with a grid I donā€™t feel I would use levels that often too.

I think I am still hesitating because I made some unpleasant experiences with buying stuff that is not yet fully implemented or still has some bugs over the last year and decided to not do that again. On the other hand the Arc has always been one of those rare devices I bitterly regretted not getting one while they have been availableā€¦

1 Like
#59

I do not yet have Ansible so my experience is fairly limited with the few Max apps available. I agree that there arenā€™t many apps that FULLY integrate with the new Arc as there is really no way to use it as an instrument without having to also interface with a mouse and keyboard, especially if you arenā€™t technically inclined to code something yourself. I would love to see some development here but appreciate what the community has done thus far. Really, if anyone is considering taking the plunge for the Arc, you should go ahead and get Ansible. Iā€™ve had a couple ideas on apps for the trilogy modules that I would love to see ported for Arc but I have zero knowledge on how to do this - not a coder. Really, they are just slight variations on the existing patches so nothing too groundbreaking. I really like the HC-TT app and am trying to figure out the best way to work with it in my existing setup/workflow.

2 Likes
#60

I agree completely. I like the idea of levels, it seems well implemented, and Iā€™ve gotten it working nicely for some utility applications. But I typically end up yearning for the cycles functionality, switching back and enjoying Cycles to no end. It is such a compelling use of Arc and modular. In a way which makes it hard for me to want to spend much time in any of the other Ansible applications.

1 Like
#61

Almost need 2 ansibles if one has both grid and arc. I spent a big portion of the day recently with Kria and, wow, such a great sequencing tool.

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#62

I need to chime in with my love for levels!

but yes, ansible is a perfect match for arc. in general there is something to be said about that immediacy of monome modules in contrary to setups on the desktop. great to have both worlds!

2 Likes
#63

I just ordered White Whale so that Ansible can be primarily for Arc since I will now have the original Trilogy. Iā€™m hoping that White Whale (and Orca) are worth justifying it on its own with Ansible since it will be next. Then Iā€™m done. I swear.

1 Like