Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Slow but steady

It's been an interesting time since my last blog entry. Since my last entry I have finally gotten my HD video editing capable Linux PC and ADSL and an iPad, for other extraneous creative things, mostly musical though. 

So now I have 6 Canon Powershot A480's and 3 Powershot A1200's and I just love the super macro focus on those little A480 cameras. I also have CHDK installed on them (that's Canon Hack Development Kit for the uninitiated) which allows soooo many other functions beyond the camera's initial design and its scriptable and controllable via various pulse widths on the USB port. 

Now today I tweeted about having a breakthrough drilling 20mm holes cleanly, and that was on two pieces of 20mm thick aluminum bolted together for exact hole registration. This is for a motorized camera slider I've wanted to have for ages. So now I am substantially closer to that goal having milled the ends of the two blocks nearly identically the same and also having drilled two 20mm holes exactly in register in both pieces. I have two 20mm stainless steel rods fitted nicely through the drilled holes and 2 linear bearings sliding on each rod. Next to machine a little platform, and bolt a threaded bold to the base of the plate for some kind of makeshift rack that a geared motor on the platform can track on.

I have some tiny PC boards that fit into the plug end of a Nintendo Classic Controller and it is my hope to make an arduino based programmable LCD driven interface, with the classic controller for programming the interval shooting and speed of the platform movement, including pan and tilt and perhaps focus too. But this is phase one, building the hardware.