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Saturday, August 20, 2011

Arduino Pan&Tilt-System | Zipfelmaus - Blog

Arduino time lapsed camera system

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fr7mZqMjGs&feature=player_embedded

Arduino Pan&Tilt-System

On this page we present the Arduino Pan&Tilt-System.
An Arduino controls a Canon Ixus Camera and two servos of the camera pan&tilt system from Lynxmotion. We also designed a aluminum plate where all parts are mounted on. You can use this design to make ultra-mega- or even giga-pixel images or make time lapsed movies from single photo shots.

Hardware

- Arduino Duemilanove (at Ebay, around 20€/$)
- Arduino Prototyping Shield (at Ebay, around 8€/$)
- 7.2V racing battery pack (NiCd or NiMh) (around 15€/$)
- Lynxmotion Pan&Tilt system (Link , around 45€/$)
- digital camera (see our hack here)
- milled 160x170mm aluminum plate (you can create and upload a design to www.schaeffer-ag.de using the Frontplatten-Designer tool, around 35€/$)
You can download the plate design in the download section.
- screws and other assembly material (around 8€/$)

Software

The software is divided into different parts:

1.) Init

Initialization of the driver modules of the servos, (serial interface if needed), button, … .

2.) Functions

There are two main functions, one for the “time lapsed mode” and one for the “pan&tilt mode”.

3.) Main loop

In the loop section on of the two main functions is called, depending on the button state during start-up (after power-up or reset).

You can download the code in the download section.

Download

Code Arduino:
click here

Aluminum plate design (for the Frontplatten-Designer from schaeffer-ag.de):
click here

Time lapsed mode

In this mode, the pan&tilt system is positioned to a stationary position. The images are taken every six seconds. You can adjust the delay like you want.
After 255 pictures the Arduino stops to take further pictures.

Combining the 255 images to one video is easy, when you use the freeware tool Virtualdub – Link: www.virtualdub.org. It’s free and extremely easy.

This is what you have to do:

Go to ‘File -> Open -> Image sequence’ and select your first photo (you can’t select multiple ones, so just click the first one).
Then make adjustments and ‘Save as AVI’ (you might want to use a codec, ‘Tools->Compression’).

Read More and see all Pics...
http://www.zipfelmaus.com/arduino-pantilt-system/

I like this one allot. Looks like it would be cheaper to build this, than to buy a Pan and Tilt Rig...

Don