Camera slider controller unit

Projects General Guidance
1

Hey guys,

I'm looking into building my own motorised camera slider since a good one cost around $1,500. It won't actually slide, but instead the baseplate with the camera will move left/right on a threaded rod which is being turned by a stepper motor (also being supported by two clean rods). I figured this allows for more weight, stability and accuracy than using a belt.

This is primarily going to be used for time lapse photography, but I would want to get a stepper motor which is fast enough to do video tracking shots as well.

Instead of using a separate camera remote controller (interval, long exposure etc) I want the Arduino to do this as well as controlling the stepper motor. This is so it all can be synchronised within one controller.

I'm pretty confident I will be able to build the actual rig myself, but I will need some help on the menu system for the Arduino. The controller box will have a 16x2 LCD, 4 buttons (Select, Back, Up, Down), and a potentiometer for running the stepper motor speed manually. The LCD also has two potentiometers for contrast and brightness.

It would be best to have the controller unit stationary at one end of the slider, which means I can either have a long cable or wireless transmitter/receiver sending signals from the Arduino to the camera.

Now, onto the menu. The setting is only applicable if the number is greater than zero.

The menu needs to have two main choices "Camera Remote" and "Slider Settings", with other settings within. The "Camera Remote" is basically the camera remote controller, as shown below:

The "Slider settings" lets you select how long it's going to take to travel from one side to the other, based on the fixed length of the baseplate. You can also select the speed i.e. 0-20 with 0.5 increments (this will be a mapped range based on the stepper motor's actual speed). The good thing about using the Arduino for both motor control and remote control is that it knows when to move the baseplate, so it doesn't move when the camera is taking a picture.

So if the long exposure setting was 30 sec with 2 sec interval, the Arduino moved the baseplate during the pause.

I probably forgot some features or made things sound very confusing, so please give feedback if you have any better ideas etc.

2

I Found a really usefull link

3

I would recommend my phi-panel for your LCD user menu system. Since you will potentially enter numbers in your menu, up/down will be very painful if you need to cover both small and large numbers. You should consider a 4X4 numerical keypad, or at least a rotary encoder so you can dial quickly or slowly to get large and small numbers. I have sample code for entering numbers and how to make a menu. All you need is to call a simple function that gets you numbers the user enters on the panel. You can take a look here:

http://www.inmojo.com/store/liudr-arduino-and-physics-gadgets/item/serial-lcd-back-pack---phi-panel/

The arduino just needs to send texts to the panel and it gets rendered into menu by the panel. You can lay out your own key pad if you need.