Driving lots of motors for kinetic art

[donotdespisethesnake]

A question that pops up now and then is how to create an installation containing lots of motors, which can be coordinated to create an artistic display, aka kinetic art. A typical example :

I have seen several questions on the subject, but no examples that demonstrate a solution. The engineer in me asks "what is the most cost effective solution?" and "How can we make a solution available to artists without much training in motor control?"

For the sake of discussion, the BMW installation can be used. For this case, I would probably use multiple stepper motors, with a home switch. The question then is whether to use one big controller with loads of IOs, with all the motor drivers operating as slaves, or a more distributed system where the main controller communicates over a network and slaved controllers control a small cluster of motors.

Ultimately I would like to create PCBs for controller and slaves, which could be used as modular building blocks for an installation.

[Alex Eisenhut]

RC winch servos come to mind
easy to power and control
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/GRC-25T-Servo-Winch-Drum-RC-Rock-Crawler-Steering-Gear-Winch-Upgrade-Accessories/254255419000?hash=item3b32cdce78:g:dpwAAOSwlQhdCzwy

[mikeselectricstuff]

The BMW installation uses a custom winch with a stepper motor. It is extremely quiet.
Winch servos are probably the easiest option, but a lot noisier.

[DaJMasta]

My assumption would be prebuilt controller modules with serial interface so you can have many of them on a single bus without too many IOs, akin to addressable RGB LEDs.  This seems to be about how most large scale options for artists are presented, and I think for people who aren't that electronics inclined, it's one of the simpler ones to conceive since you can have a single fairly standard controller manage everything, and you can still get dozens of updates a second on a long string because of the comparatively high serial bus speed for the small data packets.  There's a lot of availability of various modules that can suit these needs and interface together with largely prewritten code and standard cables.


I think the ones that are setup as reacting to sensor are more likely to be fully distributed, or which are connected to a more complicated single sensor (like a camera) and use a single board computer to do the required processing and mapping and then serially controlled motor drivers.