Max Controlling LEDs

This weekend I divided and conquered with my genius significant other, Kevin Mitchell, who just so happens to be a software engineer. I worked on my Max patch for the piece while he worked on tweaking the arduino code for the ESP8266 so that Max could send messages to it to control the brightness of the LEDs, but the colour sensor still controls the colour. At first he was having troubles with memory on the ESP, so when I sent a message with ramping values from 0-255 within 5000 ms the ESP freaked out mid way and reset itself. But he figured it out how the flushing worked and now it's working without explosions. In the upcoming piece I plan to make the LEDs audio reactive by having them turn off/on to the beat of the music. 
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Here are videos to demonstrate. The first is of it not quite working. You can tell when the LEDs suddenly flash and then turn off. The second video is of it working well and Kevin was clicking the button to rapidly turn the LEDs off/on quickly.

​For my piece I've been working on getting binaural audio setup. And I tested the different sections with the GLOBE. I figured out that if lets say you have a playlist object that is playing, and while it is playing you change its start/end points that it loops, it will not jump to the new points, even if what it's playing is outside of its start/end points. For example, sending a message that says: [selectionms 0 86450.139046]. So for my looping sections, instead of having just one file to loop different parts of, I have to go back to Logic, cut the sections, re-import each section into Max, and fade in/out the parts when I want to transition.  

I am also working on building a new spinning stand. Well the actually metal piece of it that the GLOBE attaches to was bought as part of a set for another hamsterball brand. But with my dad, we cut a piece of wood, sanded, primed, and painted it. Now we just need to bolt the wire stand piece down to the wood. This will hopefully give it more weight and make it so I don't have to hold onto the stand while playing like I did for the Etude. 

Here is just the plain acoustic mix of what I plan to use as the base material for my piece: