Hi,

I have at the moment 8-9 very jittery switches hooked up to the digital inputs of an arduino nano. Each trigger its own [osc~] after my debounce function, but not much more. I notice pd gets sluggish.

Is it taxing for pd to debounce? Should I try to take care of this in hardware instead?

(Some of the jitter is actually musically beneficial in this setup, but I still need to be able to constrain it.)

Cheers!

Are you using GUI objects between the [arduino] abstraction and your oscillators? It could be that Pd gets sluggish if there's too much happening in the GUI all the time.

Hmm, what is classed as gui objects? Anything? I have number boxes from the eight inputs showing 0 or 1, they are constantly changing. But I have the whole patch visible also with lines and all. Should I nest things instead?

Connections don't count as GUI, but number atoms do, especially if they intervene between inputs and outputs, meaning that you send the output of [unpack] to number atoms and the output of those number atoms to your oscillators. If you want to visualize the process, you can add a number atom, but preferably on the side, and connect [unpack] straight to your oscillators.
It would be best if you did the debouncing on the Arduino code and let Pd deal with the sound. You can't really do that with Firmata, you have to write Arduino code instead.

@alexandros its good then that I probably can do a lot of optimisation by just cleaning up my patch. Is there a good or common procedure for activating/deactivating visual feedback things, like number atoms? Would keeping them in a subpatch stop them from using cpu while the subpatch window is closed? Or would turning them off with [spigot] stop them from using cpu? Or would one have to delete them from the project completely in order to free up resources?

Regarding debouncing in Arduino instead, do you know where I can find an example code/tutorial of communicating the digital and analog inputs of the Arduino with PureData?

I think both hiding the number atoms in a subpatch and switching them on and off with [spigot]s should work the same way.
As for communicating the Arduino with Pd, I have made some abstractions to facilitate the process. You can find them here. Read the README file first before trying them out. Debouncing a switch is included in Arduino's examples, you can find the specific one here.

Thank you, this will be very interesting to try out. I will try debouncing with capacitors also.

If number atoms put load on the cpu just by being updated, not necessarily visually changed (if I understand you right), then I guess that goes for other gui objects like toggles, sliders, bangs?

But if number atoms, bangs, toggles, sliders etc. are not updated/banged, they will not make any difference on the cpu?

Afaik, that's wright.