Servo with and servo without

Here's two little video clips. One has a regular servo which can rotate an attached blade from 0 to 180 degrees, although it appears to be more like 170 degrees. The other clip has a modified servo that will rotate continuosly. The mod was somewhat like this one here.

The centre point of the modded servo is when you send it the number 104 from the serial port. If you send it zero it spins at its maximum rate clockwise and if you send it 180 it spins as fast as it can anticlockwise.

I'm going to run some tests on either 8 or 16 unmodded servos using one or two of the shift registers we used for the LED array in the coming weeks. This is preliminary work for some kinetic sculpture ideas I'm working on. Ultimately I want to go beyond simple reactive sculptures and incorporate more sophisticated behaviours. For now the Arduino boards are great for what I'm doing. The processor on the Arduino board can interpret information from its sensors and then trigger some output. For more sophisticated behaviours I'm thinking I'll need to bring a Gumstix board to be the brains behind the operation.

The artworks that are influencing these avenues of research range from Ed Ihnatowicz's Senster through to more contemporary pieces such as Daniel Rozin's wooden mirrors via work such as Andy Gracie's "Fish, plant, rack"

The AI methods I'm using are those documented by Melanie Mitchell, Andy Clark, David Fogel, and Margaret Boden amongst others as well as the techniques I learned form the Data Mining module I took last term.

With a slimline Unix controlled machine I can implement more powerful machine learning algorithms. By using a combination of modded and unmodded servos I should be able to create sculptures with a somewhat lifelike quality to them.