Planet Arduino

With how cheap they’re getting, everyone seems to be jumping on the resin printer bandwagon. They may not be able to fully replace your trusty old FDM printer, but for certain jobs, they just can’t be beaten. Sadly though, creating those smooth time-lapse videos of your prints isn’t quite as easy to do as it is on their filament-based counterparts.

Not as easy, perhaps, but not impossible. [Fraens] found a way to make time-lapses on any resin printer, and in a wonderfully hacky way. First, you need to find a smartphone, which shouldn’t be too hard, given how often we all tend to upgrade. [Fraens] recommends replacing the standard camera app on the phone with Open Camera, to prevent it from closing during the long intervals with nothing happening. The camera is triggered by any readily available Bluetooth dongle, which is connected via a simple transistor circuit to an Arduino output. To trigger the shutter, a light-dependent resistor (LDR) is connected to one of the microcontroller’s inputs. The LDR is placed inside the bed of the resin printer — an Anycubic Photon in this case — where light from the UV panel used to cross-link the resin can fall on it. A simple bit of Arduino code triggers the Bluetooth dongle at the right moment, capturing a series of stills which are later stitched together using DaVinci Resolve.

The short video below shows the results, which look pretty good to us. There are other ways to do this, of course, but we find the simplicity of this method pleasing.

Just a few years ago, had someone asked you how much a digital camera with WiFi would cost, you probably wouldn’t have said $6. But that’s about how much [Bitluni] paid for an ESP32-CAM. He wanted to try making the little camera do time lapse, and it turns out that’s pretty easy to do.

Of course, the devil is in the details. The camera starts out needing configuration on the USB interface and that enables the set up of Arduino integration and WiFi configuration. Because it stores each frame of the image on an SD card, the board can’t take rapid-fire pictures. [Bitluni] reports a 3-second delay was about the shortest he could manage, but for most purposes, he was using at least ten seconds.

The program has a live preview window to help you set up the shot, but before you recordings start that should be turned off so as not to overload the little processor and the I/O busses. The result is a bunch of JPG images that you can easily convert that to a video on a PC if you wish.

This might be a good way to fit a camera on a 3D printer, especially if the time lapse effect was desired. Otherwise, you might sync to a layer change. Now all [bitluni] needs is an orbital rig.

In this project, you'll learn how to use an Arduino microcontroller and a stepper motor to precisely control the panning of a camera during a time lapse.

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The post Built a Motion Control Rig for Time-Lapse Photography appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

An Arduino camera pan device project from Bajdi Electronics:

I own one of these small action cameras (SJcam SJ4000). I bought it because it’s small, and easy to take with you wherever you go. To make nice stable videos I mount it on a mini tripod. This got me thinking that it would be fun to have a little motor between the tripod and the camera to slowly pan the camera. That way I can make nice time lapse videos.
I happened to have a couple of 24byj48 stepper motors laying around, these little steppers motors have a gearbox and are 4096 steps for one rotation. They are pretty slow, so it’s ideal for this application. These motors are sold with a driver board that is basically an ULN2003 break out board.

Arduino time lapse – camera pan device – [Link]