pan-tilt

9 Articles

Building A Motorized Pan Tilt Rig For Filming

April 21, 2023 by 3 Comments

Today, anyone can shoot video because cameras are cheap and readily available. But if you want to do fancy Hollywood-style moving shots, you’ll need somebody to point the thing — or a machine to do it for you. [Giovanni Aggiustatutto] went the latter route with this mechanized pan-tilt build.

The build relies on stepper motors for clean and accurate movement on both axes. Belt drives are used to step down the output of the motors for greater torque. The pan-tilt mechanism itself is built from a combination of 3D printed parts paired with wooden components and a pair of aluminium tubes for rigidity. The whole assembly comes with a standard mount for use with a regular tripod. An Arduino Uno runs the show, using TMC2208 stepper drivers to command the motors. A control pad featuring a joystick and buttons is used for control, with an LCD to provide useful feedback to the user.

Pan-tilt systems are more typically used for security purposes, but we like the application to creative work here.

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Keep Pesky Cats At Bay With A Machine-Learning Turret Gun

July 12, 2019 by 32 Comments

It doesn’t take long after getting a cat in your life to learn who’s really in charge. Cats do pretty much what they want to do, when they want to do it, and for exactly as long as it suits them. Any correlation with your wants and needs is strictly coincidental, and subject to change without notice, because cats.

[Alvaro Ferrán Cifuentes] almost learned this the hard way, when his cat developed a habit of exploring the countertops in his kitchen and nearly turned on the cooktop while he was away. To modulate this behavior, [Alvaro] built this AI Nerf turret gun. The business end of the system is just a gun mounted on a pan-tilt base made from 3D-printed parts and a pair of hobby servos. A webcam rides atop the gun and feeds into a PC running software that implements the YOLO3 localization algorithm. The program finds the cat, tracks its centroid, and swivels the gun to match it. If the cat stays in the no-go zone above the countertop for three seconds, he gets a dart in his general direction. [Alvaro] found that the noise of the gun tracking him was enough to send the cat scampering, proving that cats are capable of learning as long as it suits them.

We like this build and appreciate any attempt to bring order to the chaos a cat can bring to a household. It also puts us in mind of [Matthias Wandel]’s recent attempt to keep warm in his shop, although his detection algorithm was much simpler.

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A Rough And Ready Pan & Tilt Mirror

June 25, 2019 by 8 Comments

There’s nothing quite like waking up on a warm and sunny morning, with the sun filtering in through the windows over a magnificent beach view. Of course, in real life, not every bedroom has access to beautiful natural vistas and abundant natural light. [Rue Mohr] decided to try and solve this issue with technology.

The initial write-up may be brief, but the pictures of the resulting project show a proper hacker’s build. A stand for an old office chair appears to serve as the base, and the mirror is mounted on a frame that allows for both pan and tilt to be adjusted. There’s a large gear to enable pan rotation, which meshes with a nifty old-school cage gear built out of what we suspect is plastic and welding rod. An AVR microcontroller is charged with running the show, with it interpolating a series of waypoints to set the mirror’s position throughout the day.

[Rue] reports that the project is nearing completion, and is soon to be fully automated. With the dark bedroom that spawned the project no longer a concern, the mirror will instead be pressed into service to provide sun to a row of bean plants.

If you’re looking for a pan-tilt mechanism, but something a little smaller, this 3D-printed mechanism might be just what you’re after.

Pirates Don’t Stand A Chance Against This 3-D Printed Pan-Tilt Gimbal

October 2, 2018 by 11 Comments

Attention: No pirates maritime wealth redistribution agents were harmed in the making of the video below.

Some projects are for work, some are for fun, and some, like this entirely 3D-printed camera pan-tilt gimbal, start out as work and then turn into fun. As professional digital FX artist [FlorianH] tells the tale, he was in need of such a rig for some motion-control work. Buying off the shelf is always an option, except when it’s boring, so [Florian] invested an untold number of hours in front of Fusion 360 meticulously designing every last part, except for some bearings, the NEMA 17 steppers, and some fasteners. Ten One hundred hours of printing later and the device was ready for assembly and a quick test, which showed that this thing is smooth as silk.

And the pirate snuff-vid? That was just for fun, and we enjoyed it immensely. [Florian] assures us that none of the explosions were added in post; all are practical effects, done with flash cotton and a bit of powdered charcoal. We asked – you know, for reference.

We’ve featured lots of pan-tilt rigs before, using everything from hobby servos to purely mechanical linkages. But this one has a certain flair to it that we really like.

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Feast Your Eyeballs On This Mechanical Eyeball

August 4, 2018 by 1 Comment

Most of us, if we have bought a single board computer with the capability  to support a camera, will have succumbed to temptation and shelled out for that peripheral in the hope that we can coax our new toy into having sight. We’ll have played with the command line tool and taken a few random images of our bench, but then what? There is so much possibility in a camera that our colleague [Steven Dufresne] wanted to explore with his Raspberry Pi, so he built a motorised eyeball mount with which to do so.

Pan & tilt mounts using RC servos are nothing especially new, but in this one he’s put some design effort that maybe some of the others lack. A lot of effort has gone in to ensuring no interference between the two axes, and in a slightly macabre twist until you remember it’s a model he’s talking about, the unit has been designed to fit inside a human head.

The servos are driven from the Pi using a servo driver board he’s discussed in another video, so once he’s described the assembly with a few design tweaks thrown in he has a quick look at the software demo he’s written emulating neurons for eye tracking. He promises that will be put up somewhere for download in due course.

If you’re in the market for a pan & tilt mount for your Pi, this one could make a lot of sense to throw at your 3D printer. It’s certainly more accomplished than this previous one we’ve shown you.

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Cat laser on a pan-tilt robot

Robotic Laser Keeps Cat Entertained While You Hack

February 23, 2018 by 14 Comments

Whether it’s our own cat or a neighbor’s, many of us have experienced the friendly feline keeping us company while we work, often contributing on the keyboard, sticking its head where our hands are for a closer look, or sitting on needed parts. So how to keep the crafty kitty busy elsewhere? This roboticized laser on a pan-tilt mechanism from the [circuit.io team] should do the trick.

The laser is a 650 nm laser diode mounted on a 3D printed pan-tilt system which they found on Thingiverse and modified for attaching the diode’s housing. It’s all pretty lightweight so two 9G Micro Servos do the grunt work just fine. The brain is an Arduino UNO running an open-source VarSpeedServo library for smooth movements. Also included are an HC-05 Bluetooth receiver and an Android app for controlling the laser from your phone. Set it to Autoplay or take a break and use the buttons to direct the laser yourself. See the video below for build instructions and of course their cat, [Pepper], looking like a Flamenco dancer chasing the light.

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Afroman Teaches Intro To Servos, Builds Laser Turret

January 7, 2018 by 10 Comments

After a longish hiatus, we were pleased to see a new video from [Afroman], one of the most accessible and well-spoken teachers the internet has to offer. If you’re new to electronics, see the previous sentence and resolve to check out his excellent videos. The new one is all about servos, and it culminates in a simple build that provides a foundation for exploring robotics.

[Afroman] leaves no gear unturned in his tour de servo, which is embedded after the break. He explains the differences between open vs. closed loop motor systems, discusses the different sizes and types of servos available, and walks through the horns and pigtails of using them in projects. Finally, he puts this knowledge to use by building a laser turret based on a pan-tilt platform.

The Arduino-driven turret uses two micro servos controlled with pots to move by degrees in X/Y space. Interestingly, [Afroman] doesn’t program the board in the Arduino IDE using wiring. Instead, he uses an open-source microcontroller language/IDE called XOD that lets you code by building a smart sort of schematic from drag-and-drop components and logic nodes. Draw the connections, assign your I/O pin numbers, and XOD will compile the code and upload it directly to the board.

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