Yo Piano

Introduction

Yo Piano was an order made by the artist Tagore González and pianist Carlos Bianchini.
In this project we had to develop a controller based on DMX-512 protocol to control 3 vibration machines for fitness. These machines are used as sonic instruments, as they have piano pieces on their top, so the vibration will produce different sound textures.

The controller based on this protocol allows to move the machines by a standard light mixer.

Technical Description

The fitness vibration machine is based on a high power DC motor. This motor is controller by a drive whose control signal is a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) signal. Therefore it is pretty easy to control the DC motor by a standard Arduino using one of its PWM outputs.

In the other side, Arduino can communicate via DMX-512 protocol. This is allowed by an external circuit called MAX-485. This module translates Serial protocol to RS-485 protocol used by DMX.

Finally wireless communication was also impleneted. The 3 vibration machines were going to stay in a quite large stage where communication wires could be a problem. Therefore, a RF communication system was used.

Schematic is as follows:

yo%20piano%20dmx%20communication_bb.png

The main controller is implemented so it can receive movements orders by a remote controller via RF, or by an external DMX sender: a light mixer or a DMX controller.
The remote controller reads motor velocity valueds from 3 potentiometers and writes their values both in RF transmiter channel and in DMX channels.

yo%20piano%20-%20sistema.png

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Github Code

The software implemented both for the remote controller to the 3 motor controler includes sender/receiver via RF, DMX parsing, and PWM motor control.

It is available in Github project.

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