Kinetic Rain — A Distributed Control System

Inspired by the display at Changi Airport, Singapore, this was a team effort for developing a similar display with feedback-controlled normal DC motors with controllers in microcontrollers (3 motors per MCU), which in turn are controlled over RS485 and Modbus by a central computer with a web interface to set up and control the animation.

Final setup on location

Configuration software

First it starts with moving the balls to the required position (the depth control on the right side of the screen can be used to move balls that are behind others). A timeline is shown at the bottom. Key-frames can be added to the timeline, which leads to animating the whole artwork. Finally there is a button for going live or generating code to be deployed to a controller on site, to run the animation in a loop.