| Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff |
| Driving lots of motors for kinetic art |
| (1/1) |
| 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. |
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