Witte Museum (2008)
The Witte Museum, San Antonio’s premiere museum of South Texas history, culture, and natural science, uses a QuickSilver servo motor in their diorama, The Sounds of South Texas.
The diorama contains specimens of many species of birds, one rock squirrel, and one coyote. When activated, a narration is played and each specimen is lit in sequence with the narrator giving a description of each bird or animal and the sound of the animal is played. The QuickSilver servo motor drives the rock squirrel lift.
The show is controlled by a Gilderfluke show control system (MP-50/40) using the popular DMX serial protocol which allows a master show controller to broadcast a packet of information up to 44 times per second (250K baud) over an RS-485 line in synch with an audio track. The DMX frame contains 512 bytes or "Slots" of data to control such things as lighting dimmers, I/O, and QuickSilver’s servo motors. Each piece of equipment is pre-configured to only receive data from its Slot. Therefore, all the show elements are synchronized.
The QuickSilver servo motor controller (QCI-D2-IGF-D) and servo motor (QCI-A23H-5) are set up with a home switch at the bottom of the lift. At power up, the servo is commanded to move down until the home switch is tripped. The encoder count is then reset to zero. From there the show controller takes over and streams continuous DMX position data to the servo motor controller. The Gilderfluke programming was done in real-time.
For more information, see DMX Press Release and Application Note
"QCI-AN045 DMX512 Protocol".