Totally New-Art Installation Project

Hi! I am a complete novice, but I am interested in creating an art installation with 60 small canvasses (3cm deep) hung on the wall, with vibrating coin motors behind each one. I would like to program each motor to vibrate in a slightly different way.

-Are there any safety hazards by closing in these materials with canvas and wood?
-How many different codes/motors can I use per board?
-Ideally, I would not like to use batteries, what alternative power source could work for a week long period of an exhibition?

Thank you for reading!

Welcome to the forum on your first post.

Some one needs to tell beginners that a difficult thing in electronics is scaling up the size. This is a problem over and above getting just one motor going. Think of you making bread in your kitchen, and then scaling up to make bread for your whole town. There is a lot more to it than just making everything bigger.

No I would think not.

Once you know the current these motors take you will be able to work that out for your self.

These motors are normally meant for tactile feedback, I am not sure you will be able to see the effect of this vibrtion. Start off and just try using one motor and see if the effect is right first before you get carried away.

1 Like

My thought too…. you may need to go for an eccentric lobe on the motor shaft to push/pull the membrane so it’s visible.

Then you have to consider the amplitude and frequency of the ’modulation’ so it’s clearly visible.

1 Like

Thank you so much for your response. I will try with one and see how it goes. I was looking at 3V motors. I also am not interested so much in a visual effect, as I am of being able to feel it? It's a project exploring the vibrations of our throats when we speak, intended for a deaf audience. Do you think it would be too small?

Thank you so much for your help!

Yes but just saying the voltage is not enough, you need to look up the current your 3V motor draws when it runs.

Thanks for clearing that up, your project makes more sense now.

Don't know, you will have to try it.

1 Like

The short word is cam. Many can be put on the same shaft and when the shaft turns, the cams all turn at once. That's how many cars used to operate engine valves, probably still do.

With short moves close to an axle you can make a lot of tilt in a reverse-lever sort of way but the strength behind that short push has to overcome that non-advantaged lever.

Depending on how you arrange the pictures, a number of can shafts turning at variable rates could make them rattle if desired.

Put magnets in the frames and electromagnets in the wall or a frame behind them, get loads of motion.

1 Like

I was going to use ‘cam’ but thought the idea of an eccentric ‘lobe’ may communicate better.

Having heard the rest of the project description, OP could be better off with small solenoids on axis with the viewing angle.

The physical resistance of the medium could address any fear of the solenoid armature being too ‘pointy’.

2 Likes

Thanks SO much, this has been an immense help!

1 Like

Amazing, I was thinking about magnets/electromagnets as well! Your explanation was also very helpful, thank you!

I have been playing about with small solenoids recently. First off the price seems to be quite high. Then you can't get much in the way of vibration out of them due to the hysteresis effect holding the solenoid closed for what in this case is a long time.

Also the "pull in power" of the magnet increases, the further into the coil the plunger goes, so they tend to snap into the full down position. A decreasing duty cycle PWM might help, but this is limited by the number of solenoids needed for the full project.

Is basically what these small coin cell vibrators use. They are normally used for haptic feedback, mainly in mobile phones (cell phones) when set to vibrate mode.

1 Like

A DC motor spinning an off-center mass makes vibration on the scale of the rotations... you can hide with thick frames mounted on springs, perhaps coils. But along with that, bright led inside of the box makes a vibrating light/color signal.

Hold a plastic cup with fingertip on the base and the open end towards the sound source and feel the sound. For sure, a piezo disk audio pickup that turns sound into electric also turns electric into sound. I have double-stick-taped piezo disks to thin cookie tin type lids and ran Arduino sound with those for speaker discs and it was weak. I wasn't up to MOSFETs and 12V then.
That's not the point. They should be fingertip vibrational FEELable and packed into gloves. Right hand, right channel and v-v.

I like fireworks I can feel all the way through.

1 Like

Sounds like a tiny loudspeaker with the cone being the art.

2 Likes

But eyes are magnitudes slower than sound frequencies.

If you feed bass, midrange and treble values to an RGB led, the blended color would analog sound. Just don't expect eyes to catch changes shorter than abot 40 ms. NTSC TV ran just under 30 FPS.

How many senses can you not just merge but harmonize, reinforce?

1 Like

I was thinking of the type of visible speaker cone travel you get when you check speaker phase with a battery. You can drive a speaker at a low frequency like a tiny solenoid maybe without the problems of an actual solenoid.
I probably don’t understand how the art project is supposed to work.

1 Like

Thank you for your feedback. I am going to take a deeper look at everyone's suggestions and play with one painting to see what can work best.

I am making a series of paintings on people with different accents lipreading the same word. I was reading that vibrations can be used to reinforce learning with deaf or hard of hearing people, and I am interested in the felt sensation. I don't mind people touching the paintings. I am propelled to having a very subtle vibration, as I am envisioning doing ten sets (50 paintings) and I think 50 violent vibrations will be overstimulating/self-defeating. 5 paintings are used for each word (mischina- mm i sch kee na). That's what I was thinking coin motors, because I think 50 of them going at once is going to create the sensation I'm looking for. I have a friend that works with magnets, and he is able to also create subtle effects, which I was also considering.

60 speakers that can wobble paintings visibly to a group. Make light paintings that wobble easier but tiny speaker vibrates tiny.

But Emily, have you opened any dead voice-coil HD's? You could get dead drives real cheap some years ago. 2 awesome magnets in the dead or obsolete drives I have cracked open so far, most Western Digital.

on the way to finding that, the HD motor as an input!

dead voice-coil HD salvage; discs, motor, magnets and cages.

I had forgotten about those. That would work also.

The magnets could be potted in a mold along with an embedded axle and bolts or holes for mounts.

Or suppose the magnet is in/on the outer edge of a wheel. A coil mounted over that could turn the wheel, be a servo.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.