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I heard you like cameras…

GoPro Mount

Yo dawg, I heard you like cameras, so I put a camera on your camera so you can take pictures of taking pictures…

Occasionally 3D printing is accused of being useless, or worse, silly. Well this is anything but silly, and it’s certainly not useless.

GoPro Mount

By combining the hot shoe mount I recently printed along with this Female GoProHD Mount we’ve got the camera-on-a-camera thing down like nobody’s business.

GoPro Mount

So yeah, camera on camera action, courtesy of 3D printing. Yeehaw.

But seriously folks, one of the great things about open 3D printing is that combos and mashups are quite common, and since we’ve first jammed a piece of chocolate into a hunk of peanut butter, sometimes things just go better together.

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Hot Shoe Mount

Hot Shoe Mount

In June I posted about my Hot Shoe Audio Mount which allowed me to put my Zoom H2 audio recorder on top of my DSLR… and I also had this to say:

The nice thing about the “Nikon DIY GPS Holder” I printed was that I can see it being a generic part I can modify in the future. I can easily import the STL file into Google Sketchup and built on top of it

Hot Shoe Mount

Well, in the past few months I’ve done a lot more in OpenSCAD than in Sketchup, so I wanted an OpenSCAD version of this thing, so while you can still grab the original Nikon DIY GPS Holder, there’s a new derivative, the Hot Shoe Mount, which features the OpenSCAD code.

Brain Slug

But what can do you with this OpenSCAD stuff? How about combining it with other OpenSCAD scripts so you can mount a Brain Slug on your camera? ;)

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Fixed: GPS Mount

3D Printed Fix

The part of my GPS mount that snaps onto the ball thingy broke, but it was a pretty easy fix with the RepRaster 5000 3D Printer. I started with this Parametric Ball Caster from Thingiverse, which I’ve used before. A quick measurement or two with the calipers to get the ball diameter and width of the caster.

GPS Mount

I printed it in orange instead of black because I was too lazy to change the filament, and on the original mount I just ran a drill bit through what was left of the broken part to give me space to jam the new one in there… a bit of hot glue, and it’s not quite good as new, but it’ll work for now!

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Inkscape to OpenSCAD

Gear!

Oh yeah! You can totally draw gears in Inkscape… In fact “draw” isn’t even the right term, as you can “render” them using one of Inkscape’s extensions. Here’s a nice post about laser cutting some gears that explains it quite well.

Gear Rendered!

Normally for 3D printing I’d export something like this as a DXF file and extrude it into a 2.5 dimensional object, like I outlined here, but there is another way… by using the Inkscape to OpenSCAD converter! (Here’s a nice blog post about it as well.)

Gear in OpenSCAD

It may not generate code that’s easy to edit, but it’s fast, and seems to do the job, which is often exactly what you want. I’m also quite pleased that Inkscape is becoming such a valuable tool not just for 2D work, but for 3D work as well. I might consider teaching an Inkscape class at Milwaukee Makerspace once we get our classroom up and running.

3D Printed Plastic Gear

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Motorized Camera Slider

Motorized Camera Slider

Still very much in progress, but here’s the first iteration of my motorized camera slider. The slider ends are this part, and the carriage is this part. I had to tweak the heck out of the OpenSCAD file for the carriage to get it to fit right. I also learned about silicone spray to get things sliding more smoothly, and the fact that it’s better to leave bearings a little loose if you don’t have precision alignment.

The “motorized” part is pretty simple…actually too simple, and I need to complex it up a bit. It’s a continuous rotation servo with a spool attached and some string wound onto it. It just slowly pulls the camera across the rods. I need to add some controls to allow for setting the speed, and some gearing might also help things move a little better. I’d also like to investigate using a threaded rod as a screw drive, which could also function as a third support.

Ultimately, I want to have a rig that will move the camera slightly, then trigger the camera to snap a photo, then repeat. I’ve got the code for all this, so right now it’s mainly a matter of the mechanical build (needs improvement) and wiring things up without it being too messy. (The guys at the Federal building told me they get concerned when they see wires and batteries.) A nice case might be in order. I might also look for a smaller ball head, as this one is quite large and heavy, which doesn’t help outside on a windy day. There’s a long list of improvements to this, so expect more posts in the future.

See a video of one of the early tests of this thing.