Pan-O-Bot

After the projet had been shelved for a year or so, I'd been introduced to the Arduino and one of the first things I tried out was to revive my time lapse rig.

So after throwing out the PC (which found a new home as my file server since the Raspberry Pi was not a thing back in the day) and replacing it with a tiny Arduino with a 4x20 LCD and a thumb stick with push for control, the system became a bit useful for the first time.

The control surface lets you set the starting direction, end direction and two of the three parameters: number of frames, time between frames and real-time to be covered. The remaining parameter is a result of the other two.

If the setup is complete, the bot starts taking pictures.

This log actually should have been written way back in 2008 or so. I'v been wanting to build a camera gimbal for time-lapse sequences for years and found the time to try it. I aquired chassis of a moving head light. The DMX Interface and otor control boards worked just fine, but the optics, lamp and Ballast were all missing and not needed for my project anyway.

The lighting fixture was intended to use a 700W discharge lamp and with all the parts for actually running and cooling the lamp gone, there is LOTS of space for other parts in it.

Back in the day I did not have the experience nor the Intention to use embedded electronics, so I decided to use what I was comfortable with: a Windows environment with the graphical programming langue VVVV.

The PC was a small industrial PC with a 600 MHz Cyrix CPU booting from a CF card. Slow but adequate. A RS232 to DMX Interface allowed me to control the gimbal from the PC.

After I got that working my real life took away the time for the project so I never took any acutal photos in this configuration (whick only worked on my desk anyway...)