Category Archives: Motion Control
… and I only ruined one Sharpie. After far more than a weekend of work, I have wired up the Shapeoko’s stepper motors to its Arduino and run my CNC through its first tests. The system has been tuned and calibrated and is now ready for a build. There were a lot of mistakes made along the way however… watch the video for the full story. Too lazy to write a debriefing now.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I was kinda majorly geeking out over this Arduino-controlled machine last week. Over the holidays, the Shapeoko 2 CNC kit I had ordered from Inventables arrived. I spent most of my free time in the beginning of January putting together my first serious workshop toy/tool. I documented the entire process as well as I could (I was far too busy trying to make sense of all the metric hardware) and summarized the entire process in … Continue reading
It’s time to move onto my next project (even though I’m still waiting for Instructables to fix an embedding bug, and Indy Mogul to review my submission to ‘Moguler Made’). This time I’m doing linear motion right by building a track with extreme torsional rigidity. It’s also a shorter track, just one yard long. The effective usable length will be a little less than that, but it should be a good starting point. Tomorrow or Monday I will hopefully be … Continue reading
After a ton of procrastination this weekend, I finally got around to setting up stage 1 of my motion control contraption. Using a simple Arduino program to step forward and backwards in a loop, I got a few test shots with my Nikon bolted to the rig. The shutter was triggered via the Arduino to prevent the camera from taking a picture while the rig was in motion. The resulting stitched video is by no stretch of the imagination smooth, … Continue reading
I just recently got around to hooking up my camera to my Arduino-optocoupler triggering circuit and I discovered a small difference between how Nikon and Pentax cameras are wired. With the Pentax, I was able to close the ‘focus’ and ‘shutter’ circuits separately. I.e. When I was using my computer mouse trigger, I was able to right and left-click independently to focus and subsequently take a picture. With the Nikon, the focus circuit must be engaged before it will accept … Continue reading
Just to prove that I haven’t been only playing video games, I humbly present to you a simple opto-isolator test circuit. This is the first step to remotely triggering my camera’s shutter remotely without putting it in any danger of a voltage spike from the rest of my motion control system and Arduino. The optocoupler is essentially a light-driven transistor with no physical link between the input and the output. The next step for me is to wire this up … Continue reading
