This DIY Turntable Just Got Freaky Fresh

Photography turntables are made for both the precise and lazy. Whether you are concerned about the precision of consistent angles during a photo shoot or you simply do not want to stand there rotating a plate after every picture — yes, it does get old — a lazy susan style automatic photography turntable is the ticket. This automatic 360° design made over at circuito.io satisfies both of these needs in an understated package

The parts required to make this DIY weekend project are about as minimal as they get. An Arduino Uno controls it all with a rotary encoder for input and a character LCD to display settings. The turntable moves using a stepper motor and an EasyDriver. It even takes care of controlling the camera using an IR LED.

The biggest obstruction most likely to arise is creating the actual laser cut casing itself. The circuito team avoided this difficulty by using Pololu‘s online custom laser cutting service for the 4 necessary laser cut parts. After all of the components have been brought together, all that is left to do is Avengers assemble. They provide step by step instructions for this process in such a straightforward way that you could probably put this sucker together blindfolded.

We have seen some other inspired photography turntables on Hackaday before. [NotionSunday] created a true turntable hack based off of the eject mechanism of an old DVD-ROM drive. With the whole thing spinning on the head assembly of a VCR, this is the epitome of letting nothing go to waste. We also displayed another very similar Arduino Uno controlled turntable created 2 years ago by [Tiffany Tseng]. There is even a non-electronic version out there of a DIY 360° photography turntable that only uses a lazy susan and tape measure. All of these photography turntable hacks do the job wonderfully, but there was something that we liked about the clean feel of this one. All of the necessary code for this project has been provided over at GitHub. What is your favorite photography turntable?

4 thoughts on “This DIY Turntable Just Got Freaky Fresh

    1. My turntable project : https://hackaday.io/project/6752-yet-another-turntable-for-photography also had the option to use IR. The black led at the from next to the menu buttons is the IR led.

      I had a lot of problems with this type of control. Certain angles and certain light sources sometimes made the trigger fail, which meant the series was no longer usable as a series of photos and to a lesser degree usable for photogrammetry. I tried various IR led types, but it never was reliable.

      Eventually I simply removed the IR function and used that hole for the cable release socket which was in the side initially.

  1. This looks almost exactly like one I got from a Kickstarter several years ago. It was OK if the subject was glued down firmly. The jerking motion of steppers made it impossible for objects to hold their position. Various non-slip material helped, but still, the rate of poor results was way too high.

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