Camera sliders are great creative tools, letting you get smooth controlled shots that can class up any production. [Anthony Kouttron] decided to build one for an engineering class, and he ended up mighty satisfied with what he and his team accomplished.
As an engineering class project, this wasn’t a build done on a whim. Instead, [Anthony] and his fellow students spent plenty of time hashing out what they needed this thing to do, and how it should be built. An Arduino was selected as the brains of the operation, as a capable and accessible microcontroller platform. Stepper motors and a toothed belt drive were used to move the slider in a controllable fashion. The slider’s control interface was an HD44780-based character LCD, along with a thumbstick and two pushbuttons. The slider relied on steel tubes for a frame, which was heavy, but cost-effective and easy to fabricate. Much of the parts were salvaged from legendary e-waste bins on the university grounds.
The final product was stout and practical. It may not have been light, but the steel frame and strong stepper motor meant the slider could easily handle even heavy DSLR cameras. That’s something that lighter builds can struggle with.
Ultimately, it was an excellent learning experience for [Anthony] and his team. As a bonus, he got some great timelapses out of it, too. Video after the break.
That camera slider has an enormous battery pack, how long is the run time? Ive seen some commercial camera sliders that generally run out after 2 hours. This looks like it will run all day. Nice build!
The original battery pack was only intended for about 2-3 hours, but once I filled the entire battery casing, it could easily run for a day or more. Thanks!
Nice video, I like how the Sun set behind the dome on the horizon.
But, I didn’t see any sliding action.
Thanks! The slider was set to step very slowly making the movements very subtle. The other video shows the movement a bit more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpTjoSMdzU
This was in ~2012 when sliders were more quite a bit more expensive than now, and this is incredibly rudimentary vs what is available now. Regardless, it was a lot of fun to make a personal project into a college project and getting credit for it :D
Thank you!
Presumably they mean HIGH-quality camera slider.
Indeed. High-quality and high-weight :D