I've been posting about playing with small, battery powered, programmable micro controllers - and things you can connect to ithem - and control.
These micro controllers1 can be had for $10 - $30 and things to connect to them and control can be had at any Radio Shack store, in addition to a ton of web sites. And you don't have to be a techno weenie or a computer programming genius to start playing with them. There are plenty of tutorials and sample programs you can download and play with. Once you have sample programs, you can start tweeking them to change what they do. It's really not that hard to learn to do.
Having played with light and sound, I finally got to playing with movement
- using a small RC servo like you'd find in a remote controlled car, airplane or helicopter. Starting with a program I found on the web that sweeps the servo's arm back and forth through the servo's 180 degree range, smoothly and continuosly in 1 degree steps with a 15/1000s of a second delays between steps.
By changing the sweep increment to 30 degree and increasing the delay between steps to a half second the servo arm moved jerkily. It was kind of disturbing to watch. So I changed the program to have it move the servo arm's position randomly, anywhere in a range from 45 degrees to
135 degrees. And I made the delay between moves also random, between 15/1000s to a bit over a second.The effect was even more disturbing - the arm darting around - never really settling into any nice pattern. It was like watching a cat watching one of those cat toys on a string flying back and forth - or the eyes of a speed freak.
Seeing that behavior, I had a basic idea for a dynamic turning. Here's where that's gone - so far. There's a link to the YouTube vid of the servo's behavior near the bottom of the first page.