Can Arduino do this ArtWork?
Any programmers out there to collaborate with?
Basically, i am doing a media wall with 1000 points of stepper motors.
However i need to transfer information from 3d software to these 1000 steeper motors.
I can be reached at eooojj@gmail.com if i fail to see this thread reply.
Thanks much.
Ed
Arduino is not a particularly good stepper-motor interface, since most of the existing "stepper shield" boards are limited to 2 or three motors per arduino (they tend to use a pin for each of the four motor leads.) Better to find some multi-stepper driver and use arduino(s) to coordinate communications between them and a PC. (I don't know of any such drivers; most aim at three or four axis and then worry about power. 1000 low-power steppers is ... interesting. And a hell of a lot of wires!)
Hi westfw,
Thanks for the reply.
Any clue where should i start to search for these "multi steppers driver" ? 
pololu.com and sparkfun.com are two that come to mind.
Sparkfun has a 4-motor driver board that is only a little more expensive than pololu's single-stepper (but very small) breakout board. You're looking at $13-16 per motor for a pretty capable (2A, 35V) Allegro Micro A4983-based driver that does microstepping and has step/direction inputs. If your motors are significantly smaller than that, or if you only need "forward/reverse" (no individual steps), you can probably put together something much cheaper using simpler chips. The Allegro chip itself is only about $2 if you buy 1000 at a time ($5 for one at a time.)
You can also search for terms like "5 axis stepper driver", but those tend to cost even more (and are typically aimed at people doing CNC conversions of their shop equipment, so they're also big, and for relatively big motors.)
eooojj:
Can Arduino do this ArtWork?
[...]
Basically, i am doing a media wall with 1000 points of stepper motors.
Well it depends on your requirements and on how you organise your steppers, but if it's just to bridge the gap between the motor drivers and the computer, the Arduino should be powerful enough and even have enough RAM.
Those 1000 stepper motors need to driven electrically somehow. Do you have some plan how you want to do that? What's your budget? If you get the stepper motors for $1 you might need to spend another $1 or more per motor to drive them. Custom boards to drive the motors should start to make sense at this scale. Or do you plan to address them as a matrix? The programming of the Arduino depends mostly how the hardware is solved and the hardware will determine the costs.
By the way, the installations shown might work with cheaper DC-motors. For the second one, attach small propellers to it and you just need to control the direction. In the first example, if the flower gears are driven with a rubber wheel, you can also get away with just running the motor more or less the appropriate time. Those motors usually cost less than what steppers cost.
Korman
Apparently the 108 bags in/deflating is done with cooling fans, those would be a little easier to control and probably far less expensive.
It wouldn't surprise me servos were used in the second video.
Steppers are normally used for precision and lots of boards are built for some power, would you really need that ?
Techniques used in both videos probably differ, not knowing what your wall should do, might... result in you buying wrong, very expensive, equipment.