live external input

Hallo,

Any chance we can have a sort of live-input feature in grasshopper? maybe a "refresh every n milliseconds" feature on a scripting component, or a little box that continuously outputs floats from 0 to 1 in a specified time interval (a functionality copy-paste of the vvv lfo box)...

it would open up some less-static side of grasshopper.

I absolutely have no idea if it's too much to ask for, but it would be great.
I guess osc is too much to ask for, but i guess this can be built later.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Giulio Piacentino on June 6, 2009 at 4:41pm

Hello Dimitrie, today I finished theEngine component. It should refresh your whole canvas at some millisecond interval. See if it can be helpful.

Permalink Reply by Dimitrie Stefanescu @idid on June 7, 2009 at 3:01am

Giulio,
absolutely fabulous. wonderful hacking. this makes me soo happy.
i've been looking through it and is this where the whole magic happens?



Grasshopper.Plugin.EH_InstanceServer.ActiveDefinition.NewSolution(true, Grasshopper.Kernel.EH_SolutionCause.CanvasEvent);

i guess it took some pretty patient reflectoring, hehe... it works great also. i can't wait to try it in a real-life situation. i mean this basically redefines every input-output notion of grasshopper out there - gone are the tedious hacks of getting something live inside it.
great work. i should stop now, i keep repeating myself.
and david, why didn't you sell this trick to us before?

Permalink Reply by Giulio Piacentino on June 7, 2009 at 3:56am

Yes, that calls for a new solution. The difficulty was not really finding that line (it's quite easy to spot with the intellisense-like feature of GH), but more choosing the right timer. A first attempt with the System.Threading one was breaking GH too often. The Windows.Forms one is single-threaded with the GH canvas and works therefore more reliably. It only has a precision of 55 milliseconds, though.

Permalink Reply by Dimitrie Stefanescu @idid on June 7, 2009 at 4:07am

Well, i never got through the first part - finding a way to call a new solution rebuild. but heh. and i really don't think the 55 milisec will be a problem for anyone. thanks again for the great work! i should work on my urban planning paper, but now i'm playing away with processing and etc into gh. i need to stop it and focus. really addictive! (i mean, remember how long it takes you to code a simple sphere distort thing in p55?)

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on June 7, 2009 at 8:53am

Very Cool. Awesome solution. Some times hacks are ugly and some times the work almost too well to be called hacks. I think this is definitely one that works almost too well. I think I'm going to have to go back an revisit some my excel updates now (which currently qualifies as an ugly hack). Great work.

Permalink Reply by WT4 on June 7, 2009 at 8:54am

This is what I had been looking for as well. Well done. Now I can do automated demos in grasshopper.

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on June 7, 2009 at 11:20am

Really amazing definition. Congrats. It's a great resource. Thanks again.

Permalink Reply by Giulio Piacentino on June 7, 2009 at 12:51pm

Thanks everyone. I'll soon post some new buffer components, which will store data between each refresh, and my flavour of "rendering sequence" component

Permalink Reply by Krystof Pesek on July 17, 2009 at 4:14pm

Hello Giulio,

this is great! theEngine is what i have been waiting for.. simply like the metro object like in PureData.. this bring Grasshopper to really interesting grounds.

Thanks a ton for this,
ps. if anyone has a good reference for grasshopper inner calls and classes, functions it would be great to have for further hacking, development.

Keep good work!
Krystof

Permalink Reply by oskar yip on January 7, 2012 at 12:11pm