I understand the point of a forum is for it to be free but I'm willing to pay to bring some great minds together to build a self levelling platform for my camera stabiliser. I'd like it to correct for the bumps in my walking or maybe it could be implemented on a boat for a smoother ride or to stop people from getting sea sick. Nevertheless I wanted to start off on a small camera stabiliser. I plan to use a accelerometer to measure acceleration and from there, calculate the distance then send that data to a stepper motor to drive a gear or a pump if it could be hydraulic. So if someone has the know how I'd love to work together. I am a 3rd year electrical engineer so I have the understanding but not the know how to put something like this together and by the way all the work will be posted to the forum for anyone that wants to build something similar (must be good english speaking).
Look for "camera gimbal" or "motor gimbal" - if you don't want to build it yourself a off-the-shelf unit is way cheaper than a custom made one.
Hi zwieblum, thats a great suggestion but for this application i dont think it would work since gimbals are more for angular correction rather than linear correction if that makes sense. For example if i wanted to film a timelapse off of a boat and didnt want to capture the up and down movement of the boat caused by the waves i would need about a good meter of linear correction depending on the height of the waves which a gimbal cant do, but a gimbal is great if the boat was rocking left to right. you would still get the up and down movement but the subject your filming would be dead level
So maybe what im suggesting would be to combine both together to achieve linear and angular correction.
Kindest Regards,
Xturano
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Professional gimbals have a compensation for that, too. You even find designs doing it on thingiverse: Motorized Mini Camera Jib by colinh3D - Thingiverse
You could even use ardupilot if you like 
Hi zwieblum,
i didn't properly read your first post, I just saw "camera gimbal" and "motor gimbal" and went straight to the search bar lol sorry. but basically i did want to build this myself because i have a Arduino r3, accelerometer and stepper motor but all the programming is over my head and wanted someone with the know how to guide me through it so im not ripping my hair out spending hours of research online i understand doing it this way is a lot more expensive but I value somebody with the know how its just so much faster in my opinion.
Be prepared to get some 4 digit cost estimates
Right. I remember how long it took me to get a single-axis camera crane levelling system working. This thing would have to deal with much greater accelerations, in all dimensions and figure out the resultant vertical dimension (relative to the boat or the ground?) and remove only that one.
OP: you're an engineering student? This would be a great project for you.
Hi Cedarlakeinstruments,
do you think you could be able to do it again, or even be able to run me through your project and the troubles you had over a video call. At a time that suits you because i would love to know more. $60 AU for an hour of your time
kindest regards,
Xavier
If we can find a convenient time to call, sure.
I don't know that there's really much to talk about that would be useful to you though. The intent of the project was to be able to keep a camera platform level as the crane it was attached to was raised or lowered. I had already designed a similar platform as a testbed so it was a matter of reusing that code. The main issues with that were finding a suitable IMU platform -- I used the (now obsolete) MPU-6050 with the arduino library that gives access to its internal sensor fusion -- and the typical control system tuning work.
Your system is likely to be harder to tune because you have more severe accelerations to deal with, and they're occurring in multiple dimensions
Send me a PM if you want to discuss some more.
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