A fellow BlinkM enthusiast over at the ThingM GetSatisfaction board asked whether it was possible to control a BlinkM on an Arduino from Max/MSP. I’ve been playing with Max/MSP in conjunction with my newly-completed Monome 40h kit, so I decided to take a stab at it. Here’s the comment I posted on GetSatisfaction:

Turns out it’s actually really, really easy!

Add a swatch. Send its left outlet to a “prepend 1 0 4 0 99”, and send prepend’s outlet to a serial object. For me, my Arduino showed up as port b (send “print” to serial to get a list in the max window), so I set up the serial with “serial b 19200”.

Program BlinkMCommunicator onto the Arduino, drop the BlinkM in the normal position, and you’re set. It’s so easy!

I expanded upon that simple patch and came up with this one, that includes sliders and a menu to select which port to talk to. The menu is not of my design; it was yoinked from Arduino2Max from the Arduino Playground.

Look for more Max/MSP fun soon. I’m really digging this environment.