Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Weekend Project: Time Lapse Motion Control”.
If you dig around in your camera settings long enough, you’re almost assured to find that it has a mode to create time-lapse videos, those magical time, compressing movies that can turn any hillside or street corner into a lightning paced. Dreamscape time lapse. Videos by themselves are easy enough to make, but if you do enough of them, you’re likely to get bored with the motionless camera framing. But what can you do here? Having a moving time lapse means moving the camera very predictably and very very slowly. You can build a simple panning rig out of a mechanical kitchen timer, but that’s only good if your time lapse is an hour or less plus, the camera will rotate a full 360 degrees in that hour.
Further, limiting your control in this weekend, project by tyler, weingarten and chris bordello, we’ll be using an arduino microcontroller and a stepper motor to precisely control the panning of a camera. During a time lapse. Using this lcd keypad shield as an interface, we can control every aspect of the camera rotation, while keeping the unit completely self-contained. What’S best is that this unit can be built for around 150 dollars and can be assembled in a weekend quite a bit cheaper than the cheapest off the shelf option. You’Ll need the following parts for this project.
There’S a lot of precision drilling in this build. So a drill press is strongly recommended. You’Ll also need these other tools.
We begin by drilling the holes in the top and bottom plates that make up the chassis start by cutting the aluminum bar stock into two four inch by four inch squares. The placement of the drilled holes matters a lot here so print out the provided drilling template and apply it to the two squares using contact. Adhesive drill, all holes in both plates according to the guide and then remove the template from the plates countersink.
All the 1 8 inch holes drilled and then tap the hole in the center of the bottom plate with quarter 20 threads build the sub assembly that will hold the stepper motor and the driven shaft start by countersinking. These two holes in the top and bottom of the channel use a small block of wood to support the channel, as you are drilling it countersink two additional holes in the side plate and attach the side plate to the channel using two small connection blocks and flat Head screws attach the pinion gear to the drive shaft of the motor and secure it with the set screw mount the stepper motor into the channel assembly and to the top plate using three flathead 632 screws and nuts make sure the shaft of the stepper motor is Centered in the half inch hole on the right side of the channel place bearings into the bottom of the channel and into the top plate of the assembly. It’S a good time to complete the rest of the chassis, attach the four threaded rods to the top plate.
Using flathead screws and then attach the bottom plate to the same rods with another four screws prepare the driven gear and the servo mount by countersinking a pair of holes into each of them, use flathead screws to mount them to opposite sides of the clamping collar. Ensuring the screw heads are flush with the surfaces and then secure the collar to the shaft. Insert the shaft into the bearings make sure the gears are meshing.
Well, once a good fit is achieved, prepare some jv weld fit the cap screw into the hole of the servo mount with the threads, pointing up and then secure the screw into place with the jb weld once cured, you can trim the screw down if it’s too Long it’s time to wire up the arduino, but first we need to prepare the keypad shield to access some of the additional pins, we’ll use to drive the stepper solder. 5 short jumpers to the shield, using a variety of colors, attach the keypad shield onto the arduino and then fit the stripped ends of the wire into their corresponding colors on the motor’s wiring harness connect, the arduino to your computer via a usb cable and upload. The sketch once loaded use the left and right buttons on the keypad to change the rotation of the camera check to make sure the camera platform is rotating smoothly, with no binding.
Once everything looks great use, zip ties to attach the keypad shield to the rods using the mounting holes you can attach just about any camera to the top plate using the quarter 20 stud and the motor should be strong enough to carry a lightweight dslr. Once you have your time-lapse set up on the camera set up panning on the arduino set your start angle and then your finishing angle and then decide how long you want the program to run. Once you confirm the time the program will begin. You can power the device from any usb power source and a portable usb battery should allow it to run for several hours.
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