Custom Work: Stage Machinery Part 2 – Motion Control

Trinculo's Attic: A few months ago, we blogged about the winches we built for Grizzly Bear. We hinted at the clever motion control system we created for them, but we didn’t go into much detail in the original post. Here, for anyone who’s interested in the technicalities of motion control, are all the details: The core problem we ran into when designing the winch system was that rather than being a cue-based system, where the instruction would be “move to position B at speed X”, we were dealing with a streaming DMX system. While the DMX system could send instructions like “target position B, speed X”, it was likely that we would encounter situations where we wanted both the target and the speed to change while in transit.