Camera Gimbals

My grandmother has been house ridden for a while, about 6 months ago my uncle installed a cctv system, however, the only way she could see someone at the door, made it so that she could see nearly nothing else. I've had this idea for the gimbals for quite some time, and stumbled across the Arduino and decided to make it happen... It's not 100% yet, I will add another picture when it is completely assembled.

Thanks to Chad and his posting here: http://www.windmeadow.com/node/42 that gave me the base code for the nunchuck.

Video: Arduino Gimbals - YouTube
(After watching the quality was very poor, I'll take another video when completed aswell)
Picture: http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/5745/downloady.jpg

Sorry about the messy desk.

That's really cool. :slight_smile:

Depending on how tech savvy your grandmother is, you might consider just having two buttons that point the camera at pre-determined positions. A "Door" button and a "Walkway" button. Or however many interesting things there are to look at from that position. Positioning a camera via a joystick might get confusing, especially if it ever got into a strange position.

Good idea. I already had an idea to make the 'c' button turn off the servos... Now you have me thinking, what if she held 'z' to set a position, then pressed 'z' to return to that position later...

That's a really nice job on that pan/tilt mechanism. Did you do the metalwork yourself? Or is it commecrially available?

I especialy like the fact that it doesn't appear to use the servo bearings/bushings and shafts as structural load-carrying parts. Somebody posted about one (from Rino???) the other day that looked very clever and compact (based on brackets mounted to servo horns), but not very strong.

Ran