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DIy motorised camera slider
Over the Christmas period I had a chunk of time off, and so of course I filled it with many more things I’d like to do than I really had the time or energy for. One of these was to play with one of my Christmas gifts, a NoIR camera for my Raspberry Pi.
Last week I wrote about building a pan and tilt webcam, and at the end of that I mentioned that the next thing was to come up with some kind of software control on the PC to allow it to be easily moved around.
A long time ago I built a little pan and tilt mount from some scavenged electronics (a stepper motor from a printer and a worm drive from a cd player) I connected it via a parallel port and used darlington arrays and direct pin out of the parallel port to control the whole thing from some script language, I forget which. It was a little unreliable and fairly cumbersome but it got the job done.
One of the first requirements for a Raspberry Pi is to get a case to put it in. Now there are plenty around and mostly not too expensive, but anyone that has read even a few of my blog posts would realise I’m really not the kind of person that buys something like a case when I could just try to make one myself.
My awesome new spindle is a serious piece of equipment and the rest of my machine now seems somewhat inadequate to deserve such a beauty of precision engineering. One way in which the rest of my machine fell short was in its ability to cope with the Electro-Magnetic interference being thrown out by the variable frequency spindle.
For Christmas I was lucky enough to be given a new spindle for my DIY CNC machine. Until this point I had been using a combination of a small rotary tool, essentially a knock-off Dremel, and a Bosch palm router.
I have a Nexus 4, which I think is a great phone. I have it in a fairly reasonable hard aluminium case to protect it. Using a case is normally a good idea; however, the thing about most cases is that they are incompatible with a dock.
If you have been following along at home, then you’ll know that last time I had a successful attempt at engraving a sign. With one main caveat. The backlash on the x-axis was still evident and ran to about 2mm.
Pretty much since the first time I turned on my CNC machine I became familiar with the term ‘binding’. The various axis had points where due to slight inaccuracies of construction the threaded rod was rubbing against something causing so much friction that the motor stalled.
Last weekend was the first time I got my cnc router to do something recognisable. After some tuning I got it to plot out a simplified version of my blog logo, backwards…
Today for the first time I attached all the motors to my CNC router. Here are a couple of time-lapsefilms of me tinkering with the system
After some considerable delay since I first started with the idea of building myself a cnc router, I am now working on the electronics in earnest.
I am a man of many interests. I generally feel there is not enough time to do and learn all the things I would like.