Jumping-Jets moving like Moving-Head??

Hello,
i'm new here and i'm very interested in building jumping jets for my garden. Next year we will build a new pond in our garden and for that i want to built some watereffects.

As highlight i thought about jumping-jets that can move like a moving head which is used by light-effects.
Have someone ever tried to make this or thought about this?

Thank for all helps!

Matthias

PS: Sorry for my bad english!

I have some original patent drawing and explanations from Wet Design (mark fuller who invented the laminar fountain) and it shows one of their mechanical drawings for making a fountain move.

Hi, thank you for your answer.
This patent sounds interesting. Can you send me this drawing for looking how they do it?

Thanks
Matthias

Welcome to the forum!!!!

what types of movements are you talking about? Do you want to control these movements? Are you planning on using laminar nozzles?

I'm not sure the laminar nozzles would be all that cool moving around. When you move the nozzle it seems to lose it's laminar effect. Laminar nozzles are very sensitive to very small changes. Maybe if you moved them slow enough. I don't know, I haven't tried that yet. That's just my opinion.

Hi,
sorry for the long time of waiting. I had some other things to do first.
Yes, i would control this movements. They should be synchronous to a song which runs on a PC.
If the stream is to bad, ich would only move the jumper while the cutter is closed.

When i have some new information, i will post them.

matthias

That would be a really cool idea. Cut then move then open. I believe that you could have some pretty good results with that sort of method. That is too far ahead of me right now. I have to focus on what I currently have on my plate to focus on that.

Do you think you will use stepper motors?

I think stepper will be the cheapest and easiest solution to move the jumper around.
For each jumper 3 stepper (pan, tilt, cutter). Each Jumper-Controler needs additions to the outputs of the stepper-motors 6 digital inputs for the end switches, 3 pwm-outputs for the rgb-led, 3 input for the dmx-bus (to control the jumper with the pc an an usb-dmx-converter) and 1 analog output for the valve, to adjust the width of the laminar stream ;-).

So it seams to build the controller-board with an Atmega128.

How does DMX work? I don't understand that. Is it a communication protocol?

DMX is a serial bus. It is normaly used to control light-effekts. But i can also use it for the movements of the jumper.
Hear you have the controlbox to move it by hand:


With the black point in the field, you control the position of the jumper. With the box on the right side, you can change the color of the stream. On the bottom, you can change the width of the stream and the status of the cutter.

Naturally i can also program automatical movements.

How do you program your chip to understand DMX?

I have found a (german) homepage (http://hoelscher-hi.de/hendrik/light/profile.htm) on which it is show how you have to programm it.
The author show also how to control a stepper or a led with this microcontroller.

Re DMX can I suggest you try www.milinst.com This is the equipment I use and its in English. Also Velleman make a simple DMX kit that will plug into a lap top etc ref VM116 made up or K8062 the kit.Also simple software included which I use.
www.velleman-kit.com Hope that helps

Hi, i know, there are a lot of shops were i can buy a lot of nice dmx-adapter. But it is easier and smaller to program all the funktion i need in my own µC. So i need only one board, on which i can place all parts for one jumper.
At the moment i think one board will cost about 20€ (~29USD).

I don't need a english side for the dmx-adapter, i'm from germany ;-).