Wireless Control of many Arduinos from a single Processing Sketch.

Projects General Guidance
1

Hey there,

I have been working on an art installation in which many individual sets of eyes follow you around a room.

I have so far been experimenting with the Xbox Kinect for tracking and then using the Vsync library to send the position values to an arduino with a 433MHz RF chip which then sends those out using the VirtualWire Library to multiple other arduinos. Each of these would then be attached to a servo to control the eyes that turn to face the person being tracked by the arduino.

I have been beset by problems as the VirtualWire Library uses timer1 as does the default servo library. I have tried to avoid this using the servoTimer2 library but I still have issues which I have been told are because both libraries make heavy use of interrupts.

I have decided that I needed to take a fresh look at things so I was wondering if anyone could suggest another way this might work. The most crucial part of this would be some sort of wireless control of servos from a processing sketch.

Thanks in advance!

2

Most obvious solution is to use radios that dont need Virtualwire.
HC-12 are commonly used and just need a serial port.
If you dont need long range , then HC-11 can be used.
HC-11 and HC-12 are almost the same except HC-11 has lower power transmitter, and is slightly cheaper than HC-12.
Both are 433 Mhz bidirectional radios.

3

I will get one of those and have a go, I've also heard that the softwareSerial Library used by those transceivers is also problematic with servos, again because of interrupts?

4

Would you consider using wifi? esp8266 have pretty good wireless signal coverage and also can be programmed with Arduino IDE.

Also you can create a mesh network.

Also your project sounds very cool, good luck.

5

I actually had some of those on order so giving them a go today!
Thanks for the library suggestion!