Motorized Panorama and Timelapse Pan Tilt Sytem

This is my second motorized panorama and timelapse pan tilt system.
This one is more portable, power saving and effective.

Two 1:50 harmonic geared stepper motors are adopted as the key driving
mechanism. Owing to the low backlash of the harmonic gear drive, the wobble
caused by the wind has been reduced greatly. And it got significant effect
on the timelapse video.

An Arduino nano and three A4988 are being used as the controller.
Simple and small. Much better than the Mega 2560 and L298 ever used in my
last system.

Step 1: Pan Tilt Tripod Head

This pan tilt tripod head consists of two 1:50 harmonic geared stepper motors,

three camera quick release adapters and some aluminum bars.

No additional gear, bearing, timing belt or else are required.

It makes the fabrication works very simple.

Precise workmanship is not required basically.

A bench drill and some fitter's tools will be OK.

Of course, a bench milling machine will help a lot.

The dimension of the tripod head is counting on your camera and lens.

My tripod head is strong enough to handle a full frame camera and a 400mm F5.6 lens.

As an advice, before go into the detail of your own design,

make sure that you understand the concept of "nodal point" for panorama.

Step 2: Controller

The two steppers are controlled by an Arduino nano and two A4988.

An additional A4988 is spared for the slider.

And the camera shutter is controlled by a small reel relay.

Step 3: Functions

This system gets four major functions for the timelapse and panorama.

Step 4: Program

In order to control the steppers and camera shutter precisely, no stepper

library is used. And to minimize the wobbling, acceleration and

deceleration have also been included in the program.

The first program is to set up the default values in the eeprom.

And the second program is the main program.

Step 5: Results

Some timelapse clips and a 880 million pixels panorama photo have been taken.

And it is the time for further field testing.

Just put everything in a backpack, and ready to a day trip for photo taking.