Rigging a dental chair with wireless motors

Community General Discussions
1

Hello everyone,

I’m very new to the world of motors and servos and custom electronics. New in that I’ve never done it before sort of way. But I have an engineer mind and committed myself to figuring out how to do this for the community theater that I volunteer for. Below, I’m going to walk through the project and what I need to accomplish, and I’m hoping that I can draw on your collective experiences to tell me what I will need to purchase (maybe even toss me a few links to products on this site) in order to accomplish my goal.

Alright, so I have an 1890’s dental chair that looks like this: s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/4b/5f/b2/4b5fb221be3fd2d3c0e97ff225fd8423.jpg

I need to attach 4 continuous rotation motors to it in inconspicuous places. I’m going to attach a string and pulley system to the chair and I’d like the motors to pull the strings in order to perform various special effects that are required by the show that my theater is producing. (I need to pull pins out of spring loaded latches so they can spring shut and “trap” the actor in the chair with cuffs around the arms and ankles. Later in the show I will need to pull the same pins out of a fake skeleton so that it falls apart in the chair) I also need to install a rechargeable battery into the chair that will serve as the power source.

Now here comes the part where I really need help. These motors need to be operated remotely. I don’t care how. If it can be done over WiFi, great, if not, I can dig out my old R/C helicopter controller and use that. I’m just not sure how to take any of these motors and rig them so that I can control them wirelessly.

The major concern here is budget. I have an incredibly small budget to accomplish this so if you guys could point me to the cheapest solutions, I would appreciate it. The motors need to be very small so as to be hidden, but have enough torque to pull pins out of a spring loaded hinge. I also have no idea which motors are quieter than others, but I would like to find the quietest motor possible. I know I’m asking a lot here, but I really am inexperienced and I would value anyone’s input on how to proceed.

Thanks guys!

2

The motors need to be strong enough to handle the task needed, do you have an idea of the torque needed ?
As for the control, you could use a Motor Controller that is capable of taking a R/C receiver as the signal. This is very common

RobotShop R/C DC Controllers category will give you some idea about the controllers. You will need a controller output for each motor so not sure if you have enough channels on your transmitter to handle all the movements needed.