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Simple mood light

Perhaps you are familiar with the Ambient Orb, or perhaps you have seen 1 of the 216 YouTube videos. Perhaps you have even gone so far as to check out one of the great Instructables. If you aren’t familiar, then consider this your lucky day, because I am going to show you how to make your own mood light for $37 ($30 Arduino USB board + $1 bright red LED + $1 bright green LED + $1 bright blue LED + $4 breadboard + some wire).

This patch allows Max to control the Arduino I/O ports using the SimpleMessageSystem protocol. The SimpleMessageSystem library is included in the Arduino IDE, and available under File > Sketchbook > Examples > Libraray-SimpleMessageSystem > SimpleMessageSystem_example_1.pde. “Verify” this file, then “Upload to I/O board” using Arduino IDE. When completed successfully, load mood-light.maxpat. A Max message “w a 9 255″, translated to ASCII, and sent to the Arduino serial port, will tell Arduino: WRITE to ANALOG pin (9) value (255). Using Max’s interface objects, we are able to control Arduino PWM pins using a swatch control, which is much easier and more intuitive than Java code.

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