Camera Slider Uses Repositionable Rail To Do Rotational Moves

December 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

You can buy motorized camera sliders off-the-shelf, but they’re pretty costly. Alternatively, you can make one yourself, and it’s not even that hard if you’re kitted out with a 3D printer. [Creative 3D Printing] did just that with a nifty design that adds rotation into the mix. Check it out in the video below.

Why should a camera get all the fun? Try your phone.

The basic slider is built out of 3D-printed components and some good old aluminum extrusion. A small 12-volt motor trucks the camera cart back and forth using a leadscrew. It’s torquey enough and slow enough that there isn’t much need for more advanced control—the motor just does the job. There’s also a limit switch set up to trigger a neat auto-reverse function.

The neat part, though, is the rotational mechanism. A smooth steel rod is attached to the slider’s housing, which can be set up in a straight line or aligned diagonally if desired. In the latter case, it rotates the mounting on the camera cart via a crank, panning the camera as it moves along the slider’s trajectory.

It’s a mechanically sophisticated design and quite unlike most of the camera sliders we feature around these parts.

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DIY Camera Slider Moves And Rotates For Slick Shots

December 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Camera sliders are a popular project for makers—especially those who document their projects on video. They’re fun and accessible to build, and they can really create some beautiful shots. [Lechnology] set about to follow in this fine tradition and built a rather capable example of his own. Check it out in the video below.

The slider relies on V-slot rails, perhaps most familiar for their heavy use in modern 3D printers. The rails are paired with a 3D-printed camera carriage, which runs on smooth rubber rollers. A chunky stepper motor provides drive via a toothed belt. Trinamic motor controllers were chosen for their step interpolation feature, making the motion much smoother.

The slider doesn’t just move linearly, either. It can rotate the camera, too, since it has an additional motor in the carriage itself. In a nice retro touch, the wires for this motor are run with an old coiled telephone cable. It’s perfect for the job since it easily extends and retracts with the slider’s motion. Controlling everything is an Arduino, with speed and rotational modes set via a tiny screen and a rotary encoder control.

It’s a very complete build, and it performs well too. The video it produces is deliciously smooth. We’ve featured some other great camera sliders over the years, too. If you want to dig into Trinamic drivers, we can get you started.

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Old 3D Printer Parts Repurposed Into DIY Camera Slider

December 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

What do you do with an old 3D printer? They’re full of interesting components, after all, from switches and motors to lovely smooth rails. [Mukesh Sankhla] had a great idea—why not repurpose the components into a motorized camera slider?

The heart of the slider is the 4020 V-slot aluminum profile. It’s upon this that the camera carriage rides, running on rubber rollers to keep things smooth. A stepper motor and belt are then used to move the slider at a constant speed up or down the rail while the camera gets the necessary shot. The build relies almost entirely on salvaged components, save for an ESP32, OLED screen, and a few buttons to act as the control interface. There are also the TMC2208 stepper motor drivers, of course, but they came from the salvaged Ender 3 unit as well.

This is a classic project. Many old 3D printers have pretty much the perfect set of parts to build a camera slider, making this build a no-brainer. Indeed, others have tread the same path. There are plenty of other potential uses around the lab or for soldering.

Meanwhile, the proof is in the pudding. Scope the slider’s performance in the video below.

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Disc Film,When Kodak Pushed Convenience Too Far

December 10, 2024 by Jenny List 47 Comments

Having a penchant for cheap second-hand cameras can lead to all manner of interesting equipment. You never know what the next second-hand store will provide, and thus everything from good quality rangefinders an SLRs to handheld snapshot cameras can be yours for what is often a very acceptable price. Most old cameras can use modern film in some way, wither directly or through some manner of adapter, but there is one format that has no modern equivalent and for which refilling a cartridge might be difficult. I’m talking about Kodak’s Disc, the super-compact and convenient snapshot cameras which were their Next Big Thing in the early 1980s. In finding out its history and ultimate fate, I’m surprised to find that it introduced some photographic technologies we all still use today.

Easy Photography For The 1980s

Since their inception, Kodak specialised in easy-to-use consumer cameras and films. While almost all the film formats you can think of were created by the company, their quest was always for a super-convenient product which didn’t require any fiddling about to take photographs. By the 1960s this had given us all-in-one cartridge films and cameras such as the Instamatic series, but their enclosed rolls of conventional film made them bulkier than required. The new camera and film system for the 1980s would replace roll film entirely, replacing it with a disc of film that would be rotated between shots to line up the lens on an new unexposed part of its surface. Thus the film cartridge would be compact and thinner than any other, and the cameras could be smaller, thinner, and lighter too. The Disc format was launched in 1982, and the glossy TV adverts extolled both the svelteness of the cameras and the advanced technology they contained. Continue reading “Disc Film,When Kodak Pushed Convenience Too Far” →

Retrogadgets: Oscilloscope Cameras

November 11, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Today, if you want to get a picture from your oscilloscope — maybe to send to a collaborator or to stick in a document or blog post — it is super easy. You can push an image to a USB stick or sometimes even just use the scope’s PC or web interface to save the picture directly to your computer. Of course, if it is on the computer, you could use normal screen capture software. But that hasn’t always been the case. Back in the days when scopes were heavy and expensive, if you wanted to capture an image from the tube, you took a picture. While you might be able to hold up your camera to the screen, they made specific cameras just for this purpose.

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Building A Sound Camera For Under $400

October 10, 2024 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

[Benn Jordan] had an idea. He’d heard of motion amplification technology, where cameras are used to capture tiny vibrations in machinery and then visually amplify it for engineering analysis. This is typically the preserve of high-end industrial equipment, but [Benn] wondered if it really had to be this way. Armed with a modern 4K smartphone camera and the right analysis techniques, could he visually capture sound?

The video first explores commercially available “acoustic cameras” which are primarily sold business-to-business at incredibly high prices. However, [Benn] suspected he could build something similar on the cheap. He started out with a 16-channel microphone that streams over USB for just $275, sourced from MiniDSP, and paired it with a Raspberry Pi 5 running the acoular framework for acoustic beamforming. Acoular analyses multichannel audio and visualizes them so you can locate sound sources. He added a 1080p camera, and soon enough, was able to overlay sound location data over the video stream. He was able to locate a hawk in a tree using this technique, which was pretty cool, and the total rig came in somewhere under $400.

The rest of the video covers other sound-camera techniques—vibration detection, the aforementioned motion amplification, and some neat biometric techniques. It turns out your webcam can probably detect your heart rate, for example.

It’s a great video that illuminates just what you can achieve with modern sound and video capture. Think SIGGRAPH-level stuff, but in a form you can digest over your lunchbreak. Video after the break.

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Shoot Smooth Video From Your Phone With The Syringe Slider

September 29, 2024 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

We love the idea [Btoretsukuru] shared that uses a simple setup called the Syringe Slider to take smoothly-tracked video footage of small scenes like model trains in action. The post is in Japanese, but the video is very much “show, don’t tell” and it’s perfectly clear how it all works. The results look fantastic!

The device consists of a frame that forms a sort of enclosed track in which one’s mobile phone can slide horizontally. The phone butts up against the plunger of an ordinary syringe built into the frame. As the phone is pushed along, it depresses the plunger which puts up enough resistance to turn the phone’s slide into a slow, even, and smooth glide. Want to fine-tune the resistance and therefore the performance? Simply attach different diameter tips to the syringe.

The results speak for themselves, and it’s a fantastically clever bit of work. There are plenty of DIY slider designs (some of which get amazingly complex) but they are rarely small things that can be easily gotten up close and personal with small subjects like mini train terrain.

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