BasicMicroUK - Forums

Hi all,

I work with a puppet theatre, and up until now, we've not employed any electronics in our work, choosing instead to use mechanical devices powered by actors. However, we are now building a dragon for a production, and there will be times when the the dragon will "rear up" via cables, and consequently not be in the hands of the puppeteer of the head (there will be 6 puppeteers on this particular dragon). During this time, in order to keep the dragon "alive", we wish to move the eyebrows, and possibly the mouth, via remote control.

I have some rudimentary electronics and networking skills, and I also have some programming background. I am completely lost, however, when it comes to assembling the components for such a task. Do I need a controller? What type of servos, and with what torque? Any pointers, guidance, or discussion would be most appreciated.

Regards,

jgaryt
The Zoot Theatre Company

You will need to start by figuring out how much power you will need to run the features. Will hobby servos sufice? If so you can use something like the ARC32 to control the servos. You could then talk to the arc32 via simple buttons(wired) or all the way upto a wireless serial connection back to a PC and run the whole thing from custom application. So how complicated do you want to get?

The problem with using wheel rotation for odometry on a 4wd skid steering device would be that the wheels will slide sideways when turning. different wheels might rotate differently depending on type of turn etc.

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kathi