OMI Arduino Motor Workshop

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Thursday, March 3, 2016

Here’s a quick video from last Friday afternoon’s OMI workshop, where we looked into using an arduino/Teensy microcontroller to drive a stepper motor.  We found that using one of the external libraries (AccelStepper), you can control the speed of the motor in steps/second, which corresponds to the frequency of the audible sound that the motor generates as it turns.  This sound can be acoustically amplified by holding the motor up against something that resonates - like the top of a desk or an acoustic guitar body - or electromagnetically using a guitar pickup or telephone tap.  This example uses the Teensy’s MIDI library, which allowed us to ‘play’ the motor using an arpeggiator in Ableton Live!