Well, I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to be building or learning in MAX. I would really like to get back to the textbook mentioned in the previous post, but there’s just not enough time right now. I’m not complaining; it’s good to be busy.

But, it’s funny how I still spending time searching Twitter for great MAX/MSP related info, (you can perceive my brain’s insistence). And, I came across a few tweets that mentioned building a clock. Neat. Meh… interesting…. next. 😉

But after revisiting my search and seeing that over & over again, I started thinking about it. How would I go about creating something as easy as a clock? And, then almost immediately…. How would I go about creating something as difficult as a clock thinking of the mechanics – seconds, minutes, hours, AM/PM. This caught my attention. Was it as easy as I had first thought?

Nope. It took a bit of thinking. Part of it was that I needed new tools which I didn’t know about or haven’t learned. I started to build a basic counter – simple enough, but how to get it to reset back to zero? After a bit of experimenting I found the Counter Object. Awesome. Once I figured how to do this (the built-in tutorials are super handy) it became a matter of triggering ‘bangs’ (as Cycling ’74 calls them) to establish the Minute Counter, the Hour Counter and so forth.

By this time the AM/PM option was simple. However, I’m still getting my head wrapped around some of the objects & their functionality. While there is an alarm, I didn’t do much with it other than have it print to the Max Window. That will take some more thinking definitely.

As you can see, I added a couple of snapshots of my work and I’ve also edited the Presentation Mode. Please leave a comment if you have something to add like a simpler way of doing this, or even one that you think would be better/efficient processor-wise. I know counting doest take a lot of computing power either, but for other stuff it would be great to know.

Not sure how much more I’ll do on this including the Alarm Mode, but it’s definitely been a great mental exercise. How did I do? 🙂

Thanks!!