OscP5 send and memory/timing issue

rick206

OscP5 send and memory/timing issue

in Contributed Library Questions • 7 months ago

Hi. I am working on a simple LED dimmer sketch that uses ControlP5 sliders to send single byte ascii commands to a microcontroller via TCP. When I set up a client with the processing.net library and use the Client.write() command for the communication, my sketch works flawlessly. I'd like to use OscP5/NetP5 instead to get Android compatibility, but something is wrong. I can initialize the TCP connection, no problem. But as soon as I move any slider, I get an immediate OutOfMemoryError. The sketch continues to run, but only about every third or fourth controller input is received by the remote server. Changing memory allocation or frame rate has no effect. The problem only occurs when I use send, which is called by ControlEvent, outside of Draw.

Is there something obvious that would account for this? Am I missing something basic about how OscP5.send communicates? I thought it would be functionally analogous to Client.write.

Thanks for any help

Replies(1)

rick206

Re: OscP5 send and memory/timing issue

7 months ago

Self-followup here. Further experimentation and research has established that my fundamental problem was a poor understanding of the rules for properly forming and parsing OCS packets and confusion about specification options. I was trying to include too much information per packet. I also needed to change the parsing routine on the receiving end of my network, and that eliminated the problem with dropped packets.

If others are new to OSC protocols and have basic questions as I did, you may find the links below helpful. OSC is actually much more versatile than I realized, but you need to choose the best format for the message from the available options and match your parsing algorithm to what you are sending.

Basic info on OSC: OSC specifications

Microcontroller parsing of OSC messages and bundles (with example code): oscuino