Camera Dolly: Parts

All the parts I ordered for the motorized slider are coming in slowly. The motors from All Electronics are really nice. One annoying quirk about the stepper motor is the 2 mm female connector. Why it couldn't have been 2.54 mm, I'm not sure. In the end, I just bent a set of standard headers into the correct width. Interestingly, the gear motor had a 2 mm male header with far more pins than was needed for the encoder and motor power. On the back of the header was a 8 pin SOIC chip. Upon closer inspection, I found out that it was an I2C EEPROM (M24C02). I hooked up (poorly soldered) wires to read the EEPROM but found that it was empty (the entire thing was filled with 255 and 254). I wrote some data to it to verify that it was functional, and I was able to read my data back. I'll have to find a use for it later.

Pulley, belt, camera cable, motors, and linear slide	Stepper motor (and jerry-rigged connector)
Gear motor	EEPROM on gear motor header (motor wires desoldered)

Camera Shenanigans

I've recently been tinkering with DSLR cameras and timelapses. Seeing all the videos of timelapses and especially the "holy-grail" timelapses from day to night have gained my attention. I've been looking into the subject for quite a while now but only now am I really delving into the details. The timelapse controller I've been working on for a while is currently parked because I decided to get more acquainted with the basics of timelapse before getting into bulb ramping. I bought a simple timer remote and am experimenting with several scenarios. I've also shot one timelapse of the stars at night. To add motion to a timelapse, I've decided to also build a two-axis motorized dolly (linear motion and one rotational axis) using the 8020 slider that was supposed to go on the CNC. The parts are slowly arriving and I hope to build it up and test it soon.

 

Night Sky Timelapse from Jeffrey Ni on Vimeo.