Max + Arduino + Industrial Motor

At Artica, we had a request to link MAXMSP to an industrial motor for an artistic installation witch we will speak about at another time.

This motor is a true beast, and since we have never worked with such a thing we decided to ask for help to our electronics guru David Palma.

MAXMSP - ARDUINO - INDUSTRIAL MOTOR

MAXMSP - ARDUINO - INDUSTRIAL MOTOR

The motor controller:
MAXMSP - ARDUINO - INDUSTRIAL MOTOR

David developed an electronic circuit to simulate a PWM analog output from 0 to 10v (originally it gives 0 to 5v), and another circuit to switch motors direction, both circuits were assembled on a shield and connected to the motor controller.

The first circuit is a transducer:

TRANSDUCER

And this is the switch circuit that tell to the motor controller wich direction the motor will spin:

PNP

Then he builded an Arduino shield:

MAXMSP - ARDUINO - INDUSTRIAL MOTOR

And the final part was the Max patch that send the direction states and the PWM values to the Arduino:

MAXMSP - ARDUINO - INDUSTRIAL MOTOR

And this is the result:

MAXMSP – ARDUINO – INDUSTRIAL MOTOR from artica on Vimeo.

And last but not the least all the source codes can be downloaded here

Flowering Tree (from sketch to the real world)

This all started with Rui Horta’s idea of having a physical tree on stage that would support my visual projections. Rui Horta came up with a drawing and I quickly put it to 3D and sent to the great artist and set designer João Paulo Araújo who made this great master piece!

Flowering Tree - from a sketch to the real world

Flowering Tree - the tree

After the tree was finally built, I’ve made the first projection test, for this I created a program in Jitter, where I have a video running on the background, and on the foreground a .png transparent mask with the tree silhouette.

Flowering Tree - tree projection program

Flowering Tree - tree projection program

Flowering Tree - tree projection program

Flowering Tree - tree projection program

Everything fitted perfectly! We were astonished!!

For the subtitles I’ve created another program in Jitter that could run videos on the background and on the foreground the subtitles could be displayed and crossfaded one next to each another. Another cool feature of this program is the ability to run videos at different speedrates, this was very useful because most of the videos were created in sync with the music, was a bit tricky to sync the video with the orchester and chorus but not impossible. Another great help came from the composer João Godinho who was by my side telling me when to swap to the next subtitle.

Flowering Tree - subtitles and video player program

Flowering Tree - subtitles and video player program

Flowering Tree - subtitles and video player program

Flowering Tree - subtitles and video player program

Flowering Tree - subtitles and video player program

Finally after one month of crazy hard-working days, and with a final week of non-stop working, troubleshooting, finetunning and problem solving everything worked so smoothed on the premiere, we were all thrilled and excited!!

Big thanks to André Almeira, André Sier and Sérgio Ferreira who are great tech advisors and always gave positive inputs.

I must also mention that the Gulbenkian crew was absolutely fantastic, without their help this epic task wouldn’t been achievable!

Click here if you want to see more photos.