Ok, so I've had this board on my shelf, I think since SELEM '08! I wasn't quite sure what to do with it until Dave reminded me I had it, and that it might work for a scan-thru effect I wanted to create. Well, after some tinkering, I can say this board is fantastic. I ended up buy a couple of very inexpensive mini-servos from China:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...=STRK:MEWNX:IT
The price is great for the servo, it's a bit noisy when actuating, but if you've got the music cranked, you'll never hear it.
Anyway, one of the things that concerned me about using DMX is that I wanted to be able to have pangolin run the DMX and still be able to interface with it seperately. Well, this can be accomplished with this servo driver. Here's what I've done:
-Connect the DMX signal
-Connect +8VDC to the input. (the servo driver has a +5V regulator, so I tapped the output of the regulator to supply power for the servo, which is independant on this driver)
-Set the range to max, 90 degree rotation of the servo
-I attached a cable to the 2 pin header for invert.
At the end of the cable connected to the 2 pin invert header I have a button, pressing the button causes the driver to invert the servo's position. Bingo, instant manual control. I can drop a frame on the Pangolin timeline to turn on the effect, this allows me to get it perfectly timed. Or, I can just hit the button to turn on the effect. If the effect is on via DMX, I press the button to turn it off.
Currently, this whole setup was just thrown together as a proof of concept type thing, I plan on having at least 4 of these servo's around the scan head and a nice manual control box. Either way, this little single shot DMX board really has some nice features. I can't wait for the 8 channel version!
Video demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT9UyDzzWzY