this week we are learning how to control a servo motor using analog input.  the servo motor is a great little tool for doing all sorts of things and i’m sure the possibilites are endless. nevertheless, following through the basic steps is essential and I was pretty successful in terms of wiring up the breadboard and our potentiometer for the first part of the assignment.

next i decided to take it a little further by using a photocell to control the movements of the servo motor and to take that idea of hand movements and apply it to shadow puppetry.  so far the servo’s motions are a bit too jerky i think for this exercise but i still do believe that it is a nice take on the idea of how a different sort of hand motion can control a puppet. I made a little video below showing the puppet in action. I didn’t have any cloth on hand though so next time I think it would be fun to see what it would look like behind a screen. i was also initially imagining a whole stage set-up with several puppets controlled by several different servo motors…may be some hanging and going up and down or somehow moving across the stage. the music in the video is bonnie “prince” billy, the world’s greatest.

Servo Shadow Puppet from Angela Chen on Vimeo.