Product Design
Building a prototype – Part 1
This is where it gets messy. I ordered electronics and parts and started building this thing up.
I’m not an engineer, but I do have some experience in electronics and soldering and what not so I expect this to be a bumpy but a rewarding road.
With some help from my engineer friend, we crafted a prototype using Raspberry Pi’s, Adafruit Motor hat, and a DC motor.
More about it bellow.
As I mentioned, solution consists of 4 Raspberry Pi Zero W boards, each with attached Pi V2 Camera on it, Adafruit DC motor HAT and Pololu DC Motor. Pi’s communicate between themselves through WiFi and are accessed through it as well. One Pi is assigned to be the Master and other 3 are Slaves. The reason I opted for this solution is to avoid mechanical challenges of lifting a heavy DSLR in 3 or 4 vertical positions. Instead this will be an elegant solution where only the subject rotates and cameras taking shots after each rotation. Main Pi will turn the platform and signal the other 3 to take the photo each time. They respond back and the next rotation of the subject takes place.
Altogether, it looks something like this:
Light it up!
I need some light in here. I made two rings out of LED’s and that alone took me a whole night of just soldering. I really have no clue how to construct this, so what I did is I cut the two discs and connected them with PVC pipes. Overall, the thing is stable, but I have to add an oscillator to keep the LED’s from warming up. Some parts have to be 3D printed, so I used the great service 3D Hubs provides, to have the custom parts for the rotating platform printed.
Cameras, Lights, Motors…
Testing the rotation platform. It’s alive!
Time to close it in and test, test, test.
This works… sort of.
There are a lot of issues with Raspberry Zeros and Raspberry cameras, though. Camera flat cable connector on the R Pi side is pure crap. It breaks so easily, I managed to mess all four of them. Had to hot glue them back in place. I don’t know what they were thinking placing those I have some cheap Chinese flat cable converters, and those open and close just fine, no matter how many times you plug and unplug them. Another big issue is, those cameras cannot focus on a near subject. Doesn’t matter what you do to them, it just doesn’t work. See the pictures bellow. I’m ordering some additional lenses and I will try with them once they arrive. I suspect the cheap pinhole lenses just don’t work. Will see how that goes.
