#TETRA LOUNGE SOFTWARE#

We try to make our software and hardware as verbose as possible. With permanent installations, fail-safes and redundancy of information are crucial to keeping knowledge of the state of the 'machine'. If either of these circumstances occurs, TouchDesigner will tell the entire cluster to shutdown and restart via the smart plugs. VVOX: The sculpture turns on and shuts down power based on a schedule that is dictated by TouchDesigner while CANbus will also report back on any power loss and communication failures. Here all the pixel data is processed and sent out to Gateways for CANopen processing.ĭerivative: What safety measures did you adopt to ensure failsafe operations of the sculpture and no 'accidents' from above? This method allows us to create animations that are within a common resolution but our “channel mask” will only output the channels relevant to the motors. What's left is only the pixel values that represent motors with the rest omitted. From this list of channels, we removed every channel that did not represent a motor in our sculpture. This layout was then converted into CHOP channels.

That resolution relates to the width and length of the sculpture at its longest and widest points. We took the asymmetrical layout and mapped it inside a grid. The layout of the sculpture is very asymmetrical. A pixel value on a texture simply corresponds to an individual motors actuation and speed.įor Tetra the motor mapping became a fun challenge. Working with a system like this on a grid array is relatively easy. VVOX: When programming motors we start by answering a list of questions, i.e are the motors on a regular grid, what motion relative to one another are we looking for, what is the rate of change in motion throughout the day and so on.

Can you explain how you went about conceptualizing and programming the motor system that runs Tetra? I’m referring here to MOMENTUM, the kinetic sculpture you produced for the DTLA Microsoft Theatre Lounge. Tetra: All the actuators laid out on a 25' long table!ĭerivative: VVOX is certainly adept at delivering incredibly large-scale motor-driven kinetic installations.

Tetra lounge