Created by Basami Sentaku, the aptly named Dancing Paper project uses several indivudally-controlled electromagnets to move the handmade objects from side to side — similar to the ice skating pond Christmas village decorations. In this installation, each of the “dancers” have a line of four magnets, while the featured dancer (after all, every group has a lead) boasts a 5×5 matrix. Hackaday’s Adam Fabio notes that 41 electromagnets were wound around bolts with the help of a Tamiya motor and gearbox.

“The actual dance moves are controlled by C code which appears to be running on an Atmel MCU. Of course a microcontroller wouldn’t be able to drive those big coils, so some beefy TO-220 case transistors were employed to switch the loads,” Fabio writes. “The cranes themselves needed a bit of modification as well. Thin pieces of wire travel from the neodymium magnets on…