Hello people I really need your help, I have built myself a motorised camera slide rail. For those who don't know what this is, it's basically a 1m long track, that has a carriage that freely rolls up and don on that has my camera attached to it. I've put a 5 to 15v motor at one end and a pulley wheel on the other. My next step is to make something that can give me complete control of the motor and connect to my camera via USB to take photos at what ever time I set the arduino board to. (E.g. Move from point a to point b over a certain time whilst stopping to trigger my camera. Is there a kit I can buy or a wiring diagram I can download, I am completely new to this Arduino system so please give it to me in a language I can understand.
Welcome! There are many existing projects and products you can google. Two things to clarify:
What type of motor do you have? Is it a DC motor. If it is, you need some way to track camera location. A stepper motor will provide more repeatability of positions. You will need a motor shield or module to control it.
What is camera USB used for? Do you mean you can trigger your camera via a usb connection? If yes, what device do you connect to the other end of the usb cable to trigger your camera, without arduino?
Thanks for your ultra fast response, it's a 4.5 to 15v dc motor bought from maplins.
The camera has a mini connector( sorry it's not USB) on it witch can either go into my laptop via USB or I have a remote control that it connect to the camera's port enabling me to take the photo!
In that case you need a motor shield first and possibly switch to a stepper motor after you play with the dc motor a while and see it doesn't reproduce locations. For snapping pictures, maybe hack into your remote and let arduino do the button pushing. Search your camera's model with keyword arduino. You'll be surprised you're not the first one that wants to do this. Someone may have done a tut on how to hack the remote.
Thanks Lidur,
I do know that the remote can be hacked I've seen someone els do it before, but how difficult do you think it will be to build an arduio to achieve what I want?
If you are new to Arduino you can download the Arduino IDE (the Arduino programming system) to your PC for freee even if you don't own an Arduino board. There are many example programs (called sketches in Arduino speak) which you can study to get an idea of how to program an Arduino. You can write and compile (verify) your own program but of course you need an Arduino board to run them.
The Arduino Uno is the best board for starting with and should easily do what you want.
You can't drive a motor directly with an Arduino as the motor requires much more current than an Arduino can supply. That means you need a motor shield (see Arduino products) or a DC motor driver. Companies like Pololu and Sparkfun (and many others) will have examples on their websites.
If you just want to be able manually to position the camera along the rail you could do so with a potentiometer - turn one way to move left and other way to move right. If you want the Arduino to control movement while filiming movies (for example) you may find it easier to use a stepper motor because the Arduino can figure out exactly where the camera is by counting the steps it sends to the motor. On the other hand a stepper motor might be noisier and might make the movement jerky,
It would be easy to program the Arduino to tell the camera to take pictures but it may or may not be easy to connect the Arduino to the camera control system.