Mike                                                                                                                                 date 12/8/2012  


It all started with a thought....
Authum, 2011, Freiburg / Blackforrest , South West Germany .
Great wineyards, and time for something new.
Sipping a German roasted coffe, we observed the living statues in front of the old tourism office.
These guys do nothing and get money for it. And when they only move a bit, everybody is excited.
Thats not fair, our orchestra plays for hours, and still we have huge gaps on the booking agenda.
So ,.... we are going to add an Marionette to MIKE.
Oeps, thats not easy to control, hence the idea of a humanoid is born. More coffee is needed.

Kind of ... humanoid, more a crossbreed of robot and humanoid.
We found out about the omniwheels, great thing for crossbreeds to move around.
Not cheap, but we found the ones we needed , affordable in Mumbai, and DHL did the rest.

Now,  Mike is 90cm tall and has 12 RC servo and 5 DC motors....so far.
That brings the question of how to get that programmed.
Well , here comes the anvil software on hand. Esay to learn, great to use, and nice price.
We use that to play the MIDI anyway, so we add a music bar to an existing song.
And mike's microcomputers get this signal by standard midi input.
Now comes the idea:
every servo motor is represented by one note, and the position of the servo (angle) is
determined by the velocity (= how hard the note is played). So, yes we play achords of
each 17 notes, and hops! does mike, all limbs jump to their new position.
And then comes the choreographic etc, see future blog entries.

2D concept in Plywood