Animatronic camera tripod mount (for theater) by winterg

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

A few months ago, my school was getting ready for a theater run of "The Little Shop of Horrors" and needed a tripod that could mount a video camera and be controlled from back stage wirelessly via radio. The whole idea behind the thing was that at the end of the play, when the plant achieved sentience, a camera, hidden inside of the huge plant, would look around at the audience and pick-out one member of the audience to devour.
I was most dismayed to find out that junior year of high school is not the most forgiving time to be trying to bang-out a completed, complicated, reliable device involving software, electronic and mechanical hardware as a one-man development team. A student needs more than 4 hours of sleep every night to be able to at least attempt to hold an intelligent conversation once a day for the duration of the school week.
I did not manage to finish the actual mechanical part of the assembly in time for the run (it's missing the all-important camera mount) but managed to finish all of the gears, mounts, wiring, soldering, OpenScad and Arduino/XBee coding necessary to get the thing moving via remote with stepper acceleration, control smoothing and a wicked-fast 20ms communication delay (by comparison, most first-person shooters operate with a 80-200ms latency). So 1,199 finished lines of code later, I have to admit it's still a work in progress (at least the mechanical camera mounts are) but I'm hoping, at the very least, the XBee and Arduino code involved in the controller and receiver sketches might help out anybody who needs to have super-fast, reliable wireless data communication with error checking and ACK packets using an XBee in API mode.
I'll update this Thingiverse posting with a video of the whole contraption moving under its own power sometime later today once I've had a chance to trim and upload the video.
The latest current source files for the Arduino and XBee powered electronics and the parametric gears can be found at their respective Github repositories here: (for the Arduino code)https://github.com/xtremd/XbeeRemoteCameraRig
and here: (for the OpenScad code)https://github.com/xtremd/Parametric-Openscad-Tripod-Mount
If anyone has any questions about my code or my tripod, just drop me a quick comment below and I'm sure a bunch of people (including me) will be able to help you out.
-XtremD