[Robin Reiter] had a powered TV stand that only rotates around 20°, because who really needs their TV to rotate fully? He wanted to turn it into a motorized turntable for shooting videos, but first he had to hack it.
After opening it up [Robin] discovered that there was a surprising amount of electronics in the base. In addition to a DC motor, there was a potentiometer attached to a gear to give feedback, but it was set up for partial rotation so it had to be yanked out.
There was also a plastic gear with teeth around just part of the interior. [Robin] took a picture of the gear and dropped it into Fusion360, using the photo as a reference image while he re-created the gear. The new piece had teeth all around the periphery. After printing it out he glued it into the old gearbox, and now he had turned his TV stand into a motorized turntable.
If you’re looking for more along these lines, check out our posts on making parametric models in Fusion360 and turning a turntable into a waveform generator.
I would properly just have remove the gear from the turntable and covered the gear on the motor with a thick rubber band etc…
However, it wouldn’t work for heavier items, like a TV, and it’s not as fun as creating a new gear.
Slowly we get to see things where a 3D printer is actually a preferred/usable item to deploy.
Took a while, the first years it has almost all been nonsense which you could do a million times cheaper and quicker in other ways.