The idea they have is is to have a few (up to about 20) little “pan and tilt” mechanisms with a laser pointer attachment on top (syncronised really really slow laser light display). I am set to receive my first delivery of lynxmotion parts tomorrow but am pushing with time so I thought I might post for help before I start as first I am looking for a solution to communicate with them.
They must all be controlled wirelessly from one laptop. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I think one SSC-32 and a blue Smirf is the solution.
You might need two SSC-32s if you need pan and tilt which is 40 channels.
The SSC-32 can controll up to 32 servos at the same time with features such as group moves, and you can have each servo travle at different distances. The ssc-32 can also make all servos start and stop at the same time regardles of how far each servo has to move.
You can get BlueSMiRF Here: sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … cts_id=582
And there is even a tutorial under “Documents” near the bottom of the product page, on how to hook it up the the linxmotion SSC-32 Servo Controller!
Here is the direct link to Lynxmotions tutorial:
lynxmotion.com/images/html/build117.htm
Hope that helps
You probably need to give a little more detail on your setup. One question is the wireless factor. Is there only one wireless connection to a central controller, or is there a seperate wireless connection to each of the pan/tilt gizmos? Also, what is the wireless distance going to be?
Just to give you an idea on the setup, I have been asked for help by a mate who runs a nightclub so I am a little shaky on details, but I by the sounds of it they would all be probably bolted to a framework all around the dance floor at a nightclub doing slow rotating patterns on the ceiling, following a triangulated point, etc. Dance floor is about 5 meters x 5 meters. This would mean that is would be difficult to connect them into the same unit. With this in mind I am hoping for something that could be controlled individually.
I am led to believe that you can only connect one bluetooth device at a time to a computer which would eliminate bluesmirfing it. would I have to go Wifi from here or is there another solution I have overlooked?
I’m sure there are cheaper ways to do this, but the request was for lynxmotion as he saw it on the web and “had an idea”. Once I have the concept working, he might pay for enough parts to do the whole thing. hehe. Other then that I have myself a great hobby. 
I’d try hard wiring everything with cat3 four conductor telephone wire. You don’t say what equipment you have ordered to work with. I’ve sent servo control signals on cat3 wire, so you may be able to control all the servos from the ssc32 using cat3, and connect the computer to the ssc32 also using cat3 wire.
just a suggestion but this might actually be a good use for the dynamix servos and their multi-drop communications as you can just daisy chain them all and then the controller just addresses which ever ones you want to move. you do give up the nice movement features of the ssc-32 firmware but you may be able to program something with the dynamix controller to compensate.
Is it possible to even connect two ssc-32’s?
sure it is with 2 com ports on your PC…
or you could go with a DLP-2232M
dual channel usb to serial adapter from Mouser and make TTL connections to each SSC-32 (although I doubt this deals well with having long wires between the PC and each SSC-32)
I dont maen to hijack this thread but I have got to ask:
How do you send sevo comands to say… channel 1, and have it go to the right controller since both controllers have duplicate channels. My guess is to “port” the communications to the controller of choice.
I think this is still relavent as we were discussing possible configurations to solve the 20 pan+tilt (40 channels) design discussion.
without modifying the ssc-32 firmware you either need to use 2 com ports on your PC or add a device that allows you to multiplex where your single com port is going. either way you are outside the scope of the canned software available as they only understand 1 com port and have no way (that I have noted) to control handshake lines upstreak of an ssc-32. so you are into some custom software anyway one way or another, and that software would have to know which com port and which servo channels are associated with a particular pan+tilt.
It should not be to hard to develop something like this in visual basic. Two commports and 64 channels 
I was thinking along those lines as well. If you created an class for a pan+tilt and then create an array of 20 objects based on them you could assign port, p channel and t channel from a configuration script or ini file. then you can tie each control on a screen to the appropriate object, or going the other way have the configuration information tell the object which control was assigned. that way you could have a single control operate multiple channels. really thought there is quite a number of possibilities so probably the best thing to do is to sit down and write out the design goals, then figure out how to meet them and write that down too so you don’t get stuck in a morass of feature creep as you code it. 
Being a responsible person, i palmed my mate off to a “party lighting” store that would do a similar thing off the shelf for quite a lot more money but had a warranty. I’m still going to finish the project as I never quit a good challenge, albeit I won’t be sponsored but I can take my time to do it right instead of rushing. By the looks of it, I really need to look around at my options and do some research.
Thanks for your help guys.
If you needed more than 32 servos, you might look into the $20 Pololu servo controllers that control 8 servos each, and up to 16 of them can be used on a single serial port for a total of 128 servos. If somebody was good at coding and programming chips, they could modify the program chip on another ssc32 chip to use * instead of # for the string start character. Then the two ssc32s could be used on the same serial port.
