Output Devices: Motors, Actuators, Lights

Making Things Move #

Inspiration #

Simple movements can make objects seem very alive.

Jennifer Greb: Electronic Creature

Jennifer Greb: Electronic Hand

@><#!!! Overtaxed Surface

Jinhee Kim #

Daniel Rozin #

Artists working with robotics, mechanics and kinetic sculptures #

Daniel Rozin – Instagram
Niklas Roy – Berlin-based artist working a lot with mechanical devices
Teija ja Pekka Isorättyä – Finnish artist couple working with robotic installations
Markus Copper
Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen – Finnish artists working with kinetic sculptures
Tim Hunkin – A engineer/artist who builds weird and elaborate machines. Also worked on making the Secret Life of Machines animation
Jeppe Hein – Very minimalistic installations using kinetic elements
ART+COM – A German design studio that specializes in creating big kinetic sculptures
Ben Hopson – An industrial designer who has a lot of very interesting Kinetic Sketches on his website. Also this article about designing motion might be of interest to you.
Theo Jansen – Amazing wind-powered artificial creatures
Jie Qi – Some interesting projects using muscle wire, paper electronics
Eunyoung Park – From Aalto Media Lab, her thesis project was LINKKI
Tim Lewis – Instagram

Resources #

Soft Robots
Muscle Wire + Paper Electronics by Jie Qi
Design with Movement by Eunyoung Park

How to Choose the Right Motor or Actuator? #

How to work with motors and other actuators? #

I have created tutorials for different types of actuators.

Working with addressable digital LEDs (Neopixels) #

I have made a simple tutorial and some examples here.

Neopixel is a brand name by Adafruit for certain types of addressable LEDs.

Adafruit Neopixel Überguide

Examples done in class #

Accelerometer to Servo #

Code #

// Basic demo for accelerometer readings from Adafruit MSA301

#include <Wire.h>
#include <Adafruit_MSA301.h>
#include <Adafruit_Sensor.h>
#include <Servo.h>

Adafruit_MSA301 msa;
Servo myServo;

// variable to store the servo position
int pos = 0;    

void setup(void) {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  msa.begin();
  myServo.attach(9);
}

void loop() {
  // get X Y and Z data at once
  msa.read(); 
  
  // Then print out the raw data
  Serial.print("X: "); Serial.print(msa.x); 
  Serial.print(" Y: "); Serial.print(msa.y); 
  Serial.print(" Z: "); Serial.print(msa.z);
  Serial.println();
  pos = map(msa.x, -2100, 2100, 0, 180);
  myServo.write(pos);
  delay(5); 
}