Follow Focus Motor with TouchDesigner

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1

Our company recently acquired a Kuka industrial robotic arm. Using the arm as a precise motion control system with a Red / Arri camera. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is automated / keyframable follow focus motor. This is where TouchDesigner comes in. Attached is a toe file as well as an API for the follow focus motor. I know this is somewhat beyond my knowledge so would be great to partner with someone who has the same interest using TouchDesigner to talk to industrial robot arms and external motors.

The motor is pretty simple 3V3 UART interface, 57600, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. For some reason I can’t get the packet structure right.

Thank you very much for your time!
followFocusAPI.pdf (107 KB)
rtMotionController.7.toe (4.6 KB)

2

Matthew Wachter from VT Pro Design has quite some expertise controlling Kuka arms in TouchDesigner, so they would be a safe bet to ping about this.

3

that’s too funny :wink:

he was the one who’s been helping me with this endeavor! just thought the more minds, the better. for now, it’s more about controlling the motor than controlling the motor with kuka. my idea is to use TouchDesigner as the control station to send a “Go” signal to the bot and the rest of the external motors.

I know it’s been done before :wink: