I have an idea for a sound installation that involves Arduino, however currently at this stage of planning, I have some questions that aren't related to Arduino specifically but the build of the installation, and was hoping to find some answers here.
Any help would be appreciated
In the link below there's a little diagram and document that explains the project and the questions that came up.
Put a motor, limit switches, speaker, and Arduino on each moving carriage. Provide the carriage with power and serial communication. Send the value 'X" to all carriages via serial. The carriages can produce the audio tone and the motion independently.
Do you have any suggestions on how to run power to the carriages? The battery isn't optional as it needs to perform virtually endlessly. running power to the carriages raises the question of cable management, considering there are 7 carries that need to stretch 6 meter wide cables can get really messy and tangled.
I would run conductive tracks along the rails and use spring-loaded brushes to get power and communications from the tracks. The tracks can be hidden on the back side of the rails if they are unsightly.
What are you making the rails out of? You might be able to press copper wire into router-cut grooves to make the conductive tracks.
6 meters is a long distance, but not unreasonable. You only need to run two wires to each speaker and as long as they are high-flex, it should be very reliable. For a cheap rail, you can use aluminum "C" channel bolted to the wall. There's a 1/2" wide variety that can just fit a go-kart ball bearing (I can look this up if you have trouble finding it) that could be attached to your speaker. A stepper motor and a loop of thin stainless wire rope and a couple of pulleys will be enough to control the whole thing back and forth.
You can also use T-slot extrusion like 80/20 for the rail, but depending on brand, it can get expensive fast. 80/20 has a lot of motion components though. I've seen them used in some outdoors applications and it's pretty rugged.
Should be enough links in this post to get you started
This would be the neatest solution.
Conductive tracks would indeed give power to the carriage\speakers, though it was brought to my attention that if I have 7 Bluetooth speakers then how would I send 7 different audio sources to them? Typically say, a computer sends 1 Bluetooth signal..
How long is the installation going to be in place? Conductive tracks get noisy over time and especially over that distance, can prove difficult to maintain good contact.
Run properly in what way?
I'm concerned that 7 of these motors will be quite noticeable, considering much of the focus of the installation is the sound component this will negativaly impact the experience
Basically, not hitting any resonance peaks. Which you will only know of when it happens, but the solution is generally to run a little faster or slower so you don't hit the peak.
It's not the motors that will make most of the noise: it's the stuff that it's moving.