Curtain Room - revisited

I am reworking the servo motor control system for the Curtain Room (the hanging curtain installation space used in The (unfinished) Ballad...).  The goals are to make the control more flexible, to be able to control each curtain motor individually no matter how many I use, and to bring the control for this all into Max rather than leaving much of it processed in the Arduino programming.   I am more familiar with Max and it has more dynamic potential to control the curtains manually, algorithmically, and using external sensors.  I approximated a number of these controls for The (unfinished) Ballad..., but for a long time had trouble getting the data from Max formatted properly and sent to the Arduino (which controls the curtain motors) through the serial port.  Serial data can be finicky, especially large streams of data, and overloads in the serial port can CRASH EVERYTHING!  After a lot of trial and error, and help from pretty much every help forum on the internet, this control seems to work more or less.   Below is a little video (with no sound) of me demonstrating the individual control of servos using a usb slider.  It might seem pretty boring, but the fact that I can move many different servors independently and AT THE SAME TIME!(see note on serial port overload) is a pretty major achievement for me.  Next step will be to re-sew and repair the curtains and get them up and moving in various patters using various input types of control.

I am folding this installation work into a collaboration with Andie Springer, who paid me and Kirsten a visit from NYC to talk about the piece.  Music and video that will be used in this new curtain installation and performance setting will be recorded in January 2014 and produced for Andie's upcoming audio-visual album.  Congrats to her, Kirsten, and Hotel Elefant for their fantastic performance at New Music, New Voices at Carnegie Hall on Weds!

Thanks to Karen and Audie at MSUMC for letting me work in there again!

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