Happy to say that I'll be building my first project in the coming few days. That said I'll be taking care of the structural build but the software will be done by another entity. We have both a limited knowledge in our respective fields of this task so whilst I am confident in my ability to physically build the project, a Timelapse Slider, we will probably be in need of some very basic support with software programming for an Arduino Mega 2560. Once we are built I'd like to share the code we have and give an outline for what we would like to have in addition which is very basic. If anyone out there would be willing to chip in it would be great. Cheers, Mark.
Cheers guys, will be building soon. Working on the code at the moment. Main thing is trying to get a start-stop-start stills timelapse and continuous option for video om the same arduino? Possible?
Yep. For continuous motion, your number of steps is just one- the end stop. Then the speed is dicated by your slider length over how long you want the camera to move (obviously), combined with however many steps your stepper has and how fast you can step it. Under load, I found the fastest I could step my NEMA17 was 2ms pulses, at 1ms or less it stalled out. At 200 steps/rev, that's 1 rev every 400ms, or 2.5rps. Based on the amount of teeth of your gear and belt or threaded rod and nut, that gives you your top speed. If you need finer grained motion because lower speeds are too stuttery, you'll have to microstep the motor and then adjust the math to the new number of steps. If you look through the .ino on my SliderCam GitHub, that has all the above math already in C++ format! Bear in mind for video the slider can be a bit noisy for audio. Not an issue if you're muting it, but if you're doing vocal recording you might need to ADR it.
Would you have a link to that GitHub? Have just joined there but searches come up as 'No Results'. Cheers.
Oh, it was in the programming section of my build write up, so I figured you'd already seen it. Here we are: https://github.com/RobTC/SliderCam
Cheers Rob, will check it out. As leader of the 'Noobian Code Illiterati' I can't promise how much of it I will understand.
Cool beans, the order arrived today but like a Muppet I forgot to order the Plate. Second order made.
