Mandrill - MIDI REALtime bridge for Grasshopper

I am starting a thread to discuss a piece of code I was working on recently. It was codenamed Mandrill to fit into the Rhino Zoo :D

Description from food4rhino:

Utilizing MIDI Controllers to drive Grasshopper. Use all those knobs, pads and sliders in MIDI controllers to update your script parameters in realtime. Taking different approach than Firefly and OSC.

Works with real-world MIDI controllers, as well as virtual controllers (Core-MIDI apps running on iPhones, iPads and Android devices).

This is the first release of this Grasshopper plug-in, it is a Proof of Concept. I am waiting for your comments here and on food4rhino.

Installation and usage described deeply, with images in the pdf manual which is packed in the zip, that contains the software.

The project is now pending approval on food4rhino. When it will be accepted, I will link it here. For now I am pasting a link to download All-in-one .zip with the software

Edit: As written in next posts, Mandrill is available on food4rhino at:

Mandrill on food4rhino

Tell me what you think about Mandrill, show what you did with it, ask for support or just say you like it!

Best,

Kuba

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mark Foxworth AIA, LEED AP on December 8, 2014 at 2:20pm

Hi Kuba,

For some reason the link to your ZIP file isn't working. I'm very excited to see what you came up with and would be happy to test with my Bitstream CME. Let me know if there is another way to access the ZIP file.

Thanks.

Permalink Reply by Pieter Segeren on December 9, 2014 at 4:45am

Hi Kuba, I have tested your Mandrill (obviously I like the idea:) and have some feedback for you. Do you want me to send it to you personally, or can I just post it here?
Kind regards, Pieter.

Permalink Reply by Mark Foxworth AIA, LEED AP on December 9, 2014 at 9:53am

Hi Pieter. This may be a dumb question, but would you explain to me how you accessed the Mandrill file(s). I've tried two different browsers but the link above goes nowhere and I get an error when I try to save the link directly. Thanks.

Permalink Reply by Pieter Segeren on December 9, 2014 at 10:20am

Hi Mark, I'm using firefox, and I right-clicked the link and picked the download option. It worked for me...
But I noticed Food4Rhino has approved it so you can try that link: http://www.food4rhino.com/project/mandrill?etx

Permalink Reply by Kuba on December 10, 2014 at 3:28am

Hi Pieter,

If you think that it is a general issue that will help everyone, post it here. If you think that you need more personal feedback, regarding to issues already mentioned here, I opened a gmail account for Mandrill support: gh.mandrill@gmail.com

Permalink Reply by Pieter Segeren on December 10, 2014 at 8:33am

Hi Kuba, excuse me: I noticed after my reply that you anticipated my findings in your manual (nice thorough job!).

Permalink Reply by Shridhar Mamidalaa on December 9, 2014 at 12:03pm

This seems exciting Kuba... but unfortunately the example definitions shows up errors can u help figure out..???

Thank u.

Permalink Reply by roderick read on December 9, 2014 at 2:14pm

Ahhh this is coool.

Thank you so much for the invite. For starters it makes sketches so much neater than the sprawl of components I used to use...

I have had issues with it ... as a first go proof of concept ace well done.

I managed to get each of your examples to do stuff. I like that the volume control actually does my computer volume. cheeky.

Error messages do flash up however and my system completely froze at one point.. Computer hard reset needed ... eugh scary.

Every time I run the PoC.exe it sees an existing file which it thinks shouldn't be there...

Think you'd best say in the documentation to leave PoC open... may not be obvious.

Every time I load a .gh I get the following error.

Plugin version: 0.9.0071

Archive file written with newer version: 0.9.0075

Grasshopper files are not necessarily forwards compatible and this file might not deserialize correctly

Object list read

Otherwise, ace, thanks, well done keep up the cool work...

I'm going to make some dancing kite shows with this now.

Permalink Reply by Kuba on December 10, 2014 at 2:33am

Hey roedrick - nice to see you here. Lets get started with what you experienced:

1. Error messages do flash up however and my system completely froze at one point.. Computer hard reset needed ... eugh scary.

Screenshot please.

The advanced examples are made in such way to max out the performance of the system. Send me the screenshot of your console, it might be that Mandrill is dropping some MIDI values write cycles, because Grasshopper is still computing the geometry.

2. Every time I run the PoC.exe it sees an existing file which it thinks shouldn't be there...

Think you'd best say in the documentation to leave PoC open... may not be obvious.

You're right this might be misleading. Mandrill is "compiled" using PyInstaller and it leaves this strange message. For now just ignore, for stable releases I will look into real python compilers.

Plugin version: 0.9.0071 Archive file written with newer version: 0.9.0075 Grasshopper files are not necessarily forwards compatible and this file might not deserialize correctly Object list read

It just means that your Grasshopper version is older than the one I used for producing Mandrill. Update to at least version 0.9.0075 ant this will not show up any more. I think that this error doesn't cause any problems as long as you don't experience some components to crash (red colored)

It's great you like the volume control thingy, it's always a good option to check if the MIDI controller setup works fine. I am waiting to see what you will do with Mandrill :D

Permalink Reply by Kuba on December 10, 2014 at 3:28am

Shridhar, please send me the screenshots of the console and Grasshooper canvas, so I could help you

Permalink Reply by Kuba on December 30, 2014 at 10:33am

As you might have already noticed there is a new version of Mandrill available. We have a beta - there are some users interested in development and I am waiting for your input here and at gh.mandrill@gmail.com Version 0.1b solves the bug mentioned by Sina (in a mail) regarding Touch Sensing in PAD mode on "touch and release sensitive devices". New component added Mandrill Pad Touch that exposes in addition the reading of touch sensor during KeyDown event. Mandrill 0.1b is avalable on Food4Rhino.

Best,

Kuba

Permalink Reply by Šimon Prokop on November 8, 2015 at 2:28am

Hi Kuba,

I have this crazy problem with your cool plugin. Once I connect the Mandrill Core Front with the Mandrill Core Back an exception is thrown saying the path contains invalid characters. I looked in the folder where the mandrill.knobs should be located and found it, so I just tried copying the path from Total Commander. That solved the problem. Looks like the capital letters are different things than lowercase letters in paths... (char* issue, right?) But the trouble continued with other components - they seem to have lost their outputs. Is there anything I could do to solve this? I have to admit that all the UDP sending and recieving using vvvv (or processing) is a little annoying...