Controlling Motors with vvvv

• Faulhaber sells excellent motors for industrial applications and have a RS232 control module which allows every imaginable control of the motors like programmed speed ramps, programmed accelerations and decellerations, using the motor as a rotary encoder or as a brake. This is the most perfect solution.

Controlling 230V AC-Motors with vvvv

You could use DMX dimmers. Make sure your dimmer is able to control motors / your motor is able to be controlled with a dimmer.

There are a couple of problem: for example a normal 230V drill machine would most probably not work on a dimmer because of built in safety circuits: To prevent injuires the motor will not turn on again, after the power was interrrupted.
Note that motors for alternating current need to be controlled via the frequency, not the voltage. You might overcome this problem by switching the motor on/off rapidly by means of an LFO node and a > node.
But it might be easier to use DC motors.

There is an old model railroad trick of using hifi amplifiers to drive motors - if you have the right motors (low voltage ac motors) you can use a standard hifi amp as a power source with arbitrary voltage and frequency by playing back sine waves from your pc. Use a 60Watts amp and the FileStream, AudioOut nodes. use two soundcards and something like cooledit to create some sine wave sound files. make sure your amp is short circuit protected and not to valuable though. And dont trust the PMPO watts specification written on most "multimedia" amps.

• for controlling motors kalle recently pointed me athttp://www.wahlberg.dk which have some very interesting things ready.

Controlling RC Servos from vvvv

have you considered rc-servos (like in model cars) instead of stepper motors?

• www.malighting.de has some nice but expensive dmx boxes.
• DMX4all offers an 8 channel-Servointerface for less than 40,-€.

Controlling Stepper Motors with vvvv

have a look at Soundlight in Hannover/Germany.

http://www.soundlight.de they have a PrintedCircuitBoard, which allows to control steppers via DMX.
• Also DMX4All .

• an other board can be found at www.shop.robotikhardware.de. The RN-MOTOR ST RS232 controls 2 stepper motors via RS232 commands. This works excellent with vvvv.

http://www.isel.de does have some industrial strength motor controllers, which can be controlled over RS 485 (which can be converted easily to RS232)

• the german ELV magazine has an article in 02/2004 about controlling stepper motors. they are selling a kit under the name USI2 (see www.elv.de)

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