Do the Cosmonauty

Packshotnik
Packshotnik

Stop Motion Spinshot Creator

Русская версия — здесь


Description

Packshotnik creates stop-motion animated 360-degree spin shots of various objects. It consists of a rotary platform and a controller and requires a camera that can be controlled via IR or by wire. Without special aids such shots are hard to create because they require precision movement and a lot of still shots has to be made for just one spin. This calls for automation.

Build

This is a very simple hack. I used Lobo, a modified servo motor with an optical encoder that I made long time ago. The former servo, which is actually a gear motor now, has a rubber washer on its axis, which is used to pass torque to the bottom side of a nice spindle recovered from a 5 1/4" floppy drive. The top side of the spindle is large enough to be a useful rotary platform. Everything is held together with pieces of scrap metal, nuts and rubber bands.

The controller divides full 360 degree turn into segments, rotates motor, stops for a shot, issues a shutter release signal to the camera over infrared and continues until the full circle is completed (or a button is pressed). The amount of subdivisions can be arbitrary, but only a few preset counts are used for the sake of interface simplicity.

Larger and heavier objects tend to shake when moved or spun quickly, so there is a setting for weak torque to reduce shaking.

For various shutter speeds, a delay of various lenghts can be selected.

Infrared shutter release is only implemented for Canon DSLR cameras. Any brand or make can be supported but I have only one camera.

Watch the Movie



Available in HD.

Schematics and code


Links

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Address of this page: https://caglrc.cc/packshotnik/
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2010 Viacheslav Slavinsky  svofski on gmail
Fri Apr 9 22:04:23 MSD 2010