Planet Arduino

The prevalence of drones has made airborne photography much more widespread, especially among hobby photographers and videographers. However, drone photos aren’t without their problems. You have to deal with making the drone follow the shot which can be difficult unless you have a very expensive one. Worse, you can’t really fly a drone through heavily wooded or otherwise obstructed terrain.

[Makesome’s] friend faced these issues and wanted to buy a cable cam — a mount for the camera that could go back and forth on a cable strung between two trees or other structures. Instead of a design from scratch, they decided to cannibalize a cheap RC car along with an HP printer and the effect — as you can see in the video below — is pretty good.

Repurposing toys is an honored tradition and, after all, what do you need but a motor that goes forward and reverses? We can’t help but notice though that toy hacking is much easier now that you can 3D print custom widgets to connect everything together.

The video isn’t really a tutorial because you will likely start with a different car and have different needs. But there’s enough info there to give you some ideas. It looks like the car’s contribution was mostly the RF remote control portions. There’s also an Arduino and some drive electronics to take care of the motor donated by an old printer.

If you prefer to slide your camera on a rail, we’ve seen many setups for that. Or try a camera dolly on wheels.

Digital cameras have revolutionized the ways that we can record and share our lives. Action cameras, such as the GoPro and other similar models, have taken things one step further, allowing use in rugged environments. If you want to capture nature, however, you may want your camera to start recording automatically.

In order to add this ability, YouTuber “ItMightBeWorse” hooked up an ultrasonic sensor to his CA Kenai CA2001 camera using an Arduino Uno along with a transistor to act like the normal start/stop button. The output is soldered directly to the button leads, and he also tapped into the battery terminals to give himself more power supply options.

He can now record birds as they feed without being there to scare them away!