Game Controller Repurposed For Flea Market Find

powerPannerControlReplacement

A jarring pan with your tripod can ruin a shot in your film, and tilting up or down usually requires some loosening and tightening kung fu to keep gravity from taking over. The “Power Panner” is a remote-controlled device that fits between the tripod and the camera, handling pans and tilts with ease. When [NeXT] found one at the Capitol Flea Market for $5, he didn’t care about the missing remote. He bought the Panner, dragged it home, and hacked together his own remote with a Sega Master Pad.

After researching similar devices online, [NeXT] had determined the original remote’s pinout: essentially a D-pad with adjustable speed control. He decided to ignore the speed pins and to instead search for a suitable replacement controller. A Sega Master Pad offered the most straightforward solution, so [NeXT] went to work separating out the wires and soldering them to a DIN connector. He couldn’t find the right plug to fit the Panner’s DIN-7 jack, so he substituted a DIN-8 with the extra pin snapped off.

Rather than use the remaining two buttons for speed control, [NeXT] chose to feed them directly into his camera to drive the focus and shutter, but the Master Pad’s wiring posed a problem: the camera would have to share the Power Panner’s ground, and the Panner plugs into the wall via a 6V adapter. Fingers crossed, he decided to push ahead and was relieved that everything worked. We suspect the shared ground won’t be a problem as long as one device uses a floating power supply, which the Panner can provide either through the proper wall wart or by using its 4 AA battery option.

If you’re in the mood for more camera hacks, check out the sound-dampening and waterproofing build from last week.

2 thoughts on “Game Controller Repurposed For Flea Market Find

  1. Really the floating power supply has nothing to do with this. He is just relying on an internal pull up resistor. While it is neat that he was able to re-purpose the controller, it really isn’t anything more than hooking up a button to ground, which for this case would absolutely have to be connected to the pan/tilt system’s ground in order for it to always work.

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