Hey guys, I'm trying to get 3 Peggy boards to combine as a display- through (perhaps!) the easiest way of linking the boards themselves with Arduino-I2C and then routing my display output (split into fragments) from Quartz Compositor to software serial. Basically what Jay Clegg has documented- but with 3x the outputs! Figured that the boards didn't need to talk to each other if the source knew the order and split the data correctly.

...just that the plugin for Quartz refuses to render more than one instance, essentially meaning I'm limited to driving one board for now. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with how Quartz handles rendering layers and plugin instances, as I get to choose which Peggy gets driven by rearranging layer/renderer order in QC.

Any solutions to this? I know multiple displays are easily driven through Processing, but given the more video oriented nature of my project, I'd greatly prefer working in QC throughout the whole workflow....


Is it possible to rework the QC plugin to accept multiple routings in a single instance? I'm pretty alien to Obj-C and under an oddly tight deadline to solve things, so I'd really appreciate any help now Thanks!

I'm not sure that this is the easiest way, depending on which version of the Peggy board you have. If you have the current version, then there is an option to wire it up with serial inputs rather than I2C inputs. And, if you have three serial outputs, this is much easier to manage than three I2C outputs.

I'm not sure of the particulars of the QC module, but it seems to me that it should be possible to do all of this in QC.

Can you say a little bit more about your planned hardware end of things? Is it Mac->USB->Arduino->3 software serial ports, or something else?

Yeah, my setup's detailed as such, passing through Arduino through software serial first. I've the v2.3 boards too.

I don't think I2C's the actual problem- we've addressed up to 2 screens on one Mac, just not in Quartz, so everything between the Arduino and Peggy seems to be fine. Also at TWI freq of 20k, everything seems to work proper (no scanline glitching or lag!)

Quartz seems to have a mental block of allowing one instance of a specific renderer plugin (not exact about it)- you even need Quartz Visualizer to get it to render on multiple (real) screens at once. Could it be the same for the serial output plugin as it's designated as a renderer?


Currently having a few proposed workarounds...
Gotta get this working before Sunday (finalized mock-up demo), which is a bit scary

The quick fix: 4 macs. Host running my designated patch, pushing it to 3 mac slaves who then push it to the peggys. I know of v002's Siphon, but that's for sharing frames through the GPU- any way to do it through a network?

The thorough fixes would be trying to replace the plugin; Going to try to see if Kineme's Serial I/O patch works, and whether if I can cheat Quartz by using multiple names of a plugin and so forth (still hacky though)