360° Photography Made Easy

rotate

The graphic above wasn’t painstakingly stitched together by rotating a camera lens on a lazy suzan a tiny bit, taking a picture, and repeating the process fifty times. This is high tech stuff, courtesy of Zcapture, a tool for automated 360 degree photography of small objects.

For the last 15 years, [Jared] has been spending a lot of time on eCommerce and found existing solutions to displaying products online to be very lacking. After playing around with the Basic Stamp eight years ago and most recently the Arduino, [jared] decided he would build something to solve his problem – an automated box that takes pictures of a rotating product.

Inside the Zcapture is an Arduino connected to a motor and the software to control Canon and Nikon DSLRs. Put the Zcapture in a soft box, light it up, set up your camera, and you have a computer-controlled lazy suzan robot that will take pictures of any object, then stitch them together into an animated GIF or a fancy eCommerce rotating image viewer

32 thoughts on “360° Photography Made Easy

    1. its not even mentioned in the text that its a kickstarter. I remember earlier articles where its said “we dont often promote kickstarters here but this one is really worth it…” or something like that. I wish Hackaday will keep away from more commercial stuff like kickstarter campaigns again in the future

      1. I fail to see what’s wrong with someone who is basically like any other reader here taking their project to the next step. Hacks are great, but when a hack turns out to be something that could make someone else’s life easier, why not make it accessible?

  1. OK so it says open source, but try and find any source code for anything and you wont. they say it will be available but where. Sorry this looks more commercial than open source to me.

    someone please prove me wrong

    1. Even if they don’t share the code for this specific project it isn’t hard to find the building blocks elsewhere. Tutorials for driving a stepper motor are all over the net. Pinouts for camera connectors are also plentiful. Code for IR remotes can be found as well without much effort.

      I’m not saying they shouldn’t release it themselves but if you can’t wait there are options :)

    1. This is nothing like Arqspin. Arqspin is a turntable alone. There is no smarts in it. No control it shoots a video and then craps it out as separate images. It is like comparing a drag race car to a rokon because it has wheels and a motor…
      AND you don’t have to pay 200 a month with this.

  2. I like that it’s *not* a 3d scanner. You don’t need a fully meshed skinned model of something, if you’re just trying to show a buyer what it looks like. Simple photos and a simple interface are exactly the right solution, for a limited but common class of problems.

    In other news, CHDK and an egg-timer. But a packaged solution is nice too. :)

  3. This is closed-source until all the components are readily available for download. “Open-source” is becoming somewhat of a sensationalist term to gain from lately. Their website has no downloads available and mentions nothing about open-source.

    That said it’s a neat little package between the motorized lazy-susan and the camera automation.

    1. Of course it’s for photographers, but this is targeting a niche in a niche. Small product commercial photography is a small segment of the potential audience for this.
      I build my rotation platform for heavy object and use in the field (outdoors middle of nowhere). I think that anybody who seriously needs a solution like this, really needs a custom build, not a one size fits no one.

  4. Was I the only one trying (reflexively) to find the way to roll the view?
    It spins things nicely in the demos I tried
    just wondering how badly the end users
    will be able to foul that..
    (insert standard scripting, 3rd party, etc grumbling here)

    I’ve run across some apps (Flash based, no less)
    that would use your photos
    ( that you have to shoot on your own)
    to make a nice spin and/or roller view.

    [ wonders to self IF I could ever track down
    where any of those cool looking programs
    were downloaded and saved ..
    too many HDDs sitting around :P ]

  5. Nice output. Slight wobble on spinning table. Should paint it a solid lumi green to knock out in editing. Good hd video camera and technics 1210 and convert to gif would suffice. Nice work tho

  6. “The graphic above wasn’t painstakingly stitched together by rotating a camera lens on a lazy suzan a tiny bit, taking a picture, and repeating the process fifty times.”

    Except that’s exactly how it was created just getting a computer to do the painstaking part.

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