I have a student trying to sign up to the list and ask a question but he is having some trouble being approved to this list. I am pasting his question below and will send any responses to him! Thanks for any advice you might have. His email address is jgartens@tulane.edu

From: Gartenstein, Jacob P
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2019 12:50 AM
To: pd-list@lists.iem.at <pd-list@lists.iem.at>
Subject: Questions about External

Dear Pd Community -

I'm trying to create an object, via a pd external, which takes in several parameters, does internal calculations, and outputs several lists of floats.

Part of the internal calculation process includes reading thousands of lines of equation coefficients from text documents. These coefficients, along with the input parameters, are necessary to perform the internal calculations.

I've linked the pd external, entitled trackingPlanets, which creates in pd but doesn't perform any of the desired functionality. Pd crashes every time a bang hits the object, which is what triggers the internal calculations, including reading the text files. Through the course of some tests, I've discovered that the text file reading functions cause pd to crash.

My questions:

Is there some method to internally read data from text files in pd?

Are the internal calculations too much and causing pd to crash?

Are there more efficient methods of reaching my desired functionality that may help pd run more smoothly?

Thanks in advance for the help,

Jake Gartenstein

Materials:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KYB9GyP31I9tGfwFnY7ctfUH24qvClXa?usp=sharing