Coming to the end of a makerfest vacation week. I culminated last night with a near all night marathon build session with Max and our friend Jeremy. Our goal was to get his new computer controlled robotic camera slider working by the end of the night.. .and I’m psyched to say that we were successful.. After a long couple of days of brainstorming, trial and error, and restarts the beast was humming along prettily by about 3:30 AM .  The trick was to choose the right approaches to a bunch of decisions  including  (final decisions in bold) : kind of motor (stepper, modified servo or geared brush-less ). the right kind of drive (cogged belt, string.) idler set up ( erector set home brew, old motor, vcr rotation encoder) motor mounting (top vs bottom), stepper mode (single, double, interleaved, or microstepping).

 

The devil as always was in th details.. pulleys had to be recentered, heights had to be adjusted, code re-written.. and rewritten and rewritten……  but by about 3.. everything was working solidly…

 

I’ll post a video from max’s camera as soon asI can.. so you can see what this thing does…

It’s a thing of beauty.. able to move max’s camera down the track smoothly in a few seconds or a few hours.. depending on the shot..

 

My desk… on the other hand.. was less a thing of beauty this morning.. I spent an hour cleaning it for the 3rd time this week…   but it was so worth it. I get so much pleasure working with my ids like this… I’m blessed…

OK.. now I ned to sleep.. more tomorrow…

-nite all, nite sam

-me