Where some people might see a pile of junk, Hackaday reader and budget-conscious photo nut [FantomFotographer] sees inspiration. He was in search of a rig that would help him take better panoramic photos and found all that he needed to build one right around him.
He had an old tripod kicking around, which serves as the base for rig. At the top sits a pair of servos [FantomFotographer] attached to the tripod with some scrap wood, screws, and glue. The servos are driven by an Arduino Nano, which sits comfortably in a plastic enclosure he scavenged from trash heap. He uses an IR receiver to control the whole thing, which allows him to not only change shooting angles, but camera settings as well.
While it might sound like all is well with his upcycled camera rig, [FantomFotographer] says that like every project, there is some room for improvement. He’s keeping the source code under wraps at the moment, but once he gets everything working to his liking, he says that he’ll release it.
In the meantime, be sure to check out the cool panoramas he has put together.
I don’t really see the point. Almost all better point and shoots nowadays have free hand panorama mode.
Agreed. I’m not sure that lugging this rig around on your holidays would be ‘simple’ either…
Interesting idea and I’m sure it kept the builder busy but I doubt it’ll catch on.
I don’t understand the negativity here. It looks like it has servo’s for horizontal & vertical panning. Most PoS’s only do horizontal.
Also, the tripod mount means that you eliminate any hand jitter and inaccuracies that make the photomerge more difficult.
Further, most PoS’s photomerge is subpar, coupled with the jitter from using your hands you frequently end up with artifacts in the image.
Finally, this is a “set it and forget it” setup, you plop down the tripod and hit a button and it will create a perfect set of images for you to use.
With a bit of software adaptation you could probably set it up to track the sky for night photography, although he would probably want to invest in a more rigid setup for that.
Agreed. I’m working on my PhD at an image processing lab and the sight of people commenting that you can just wave your camera around by hand made me cringe.
I firmly believe “what’s the point” comments have no place on this blog. If you don’t see the point then you lack intellectual curiosity.
Come back when you have A 360 * 180 degree 2 axis panohead that can sport telelens captures within 4 degrees, like my rig. Then we’ll see again.
Hi, do you have pictures of your setup?
Of course I have….
Of course not, because it’s called bragging. And if retepvosnul really build a rig like that, I don’t see the point of coming here to say : “mine is better than yours”… it’s still bragging.
Here a link of a similar setup but then not limited to panoramic photo’s:
http://www.ewoutvb.com/4180/presentation.pdf