Paparazzi Base board Build

/

These are all the components mounted on the base board. There are four servos, one for each direction. We could probably get away with two, but I thought I could get a bit more power with four. On the bottom we have the Pico which controls everything. On the right we have a servo controller board and on the top we have a Useful Sensors person detector which tells the PICO where the subject is.

3D printed Snap Together Fittings

/

This is how I’m supporting my camera. The shaft on the right has a ball on the top which snaps into a hole in the fitting which will be stuck into the camera. I’ve not made much “push fit” stuff like this with the 3D printer and it works very well, which is nice. There’s a very satisfying “click” when the two parts go together. The shaft will be bolted to the back plate, and I’m going to put wires into the fitting in the camera which will be connected to servos to move the camera around.

Hull CS50 T Shirts - and don't forget to register

/

Our 50th Anniversary celebration is in two weeks. Time to think about some T shirts… I’ve created a poll in the Announcements thread on the Discord channel for the event. If you fancy a shirt to celebrate the occasion, put a vote in and I’ll set up a way you can get one.

If you are coming next week it will be lovely to see you. We are working on content for the event at the moment. If you’ve not registered you really should do soon, we will be closing registrations soon so that we can finalise the numbers. You can find out more about the event here.

Paparazzi Pan and Tilt Fail

/

I’m trying to make an old point and shoot camera follow you around the room. I need something to move the camera around. My super-powerful servos arrived today. I thought they might do the moving for me. I designed the little pan and tilt mechanism that you can see above. The tray on the left is where you put the camera. There is a servo behind the tray which does the panning, and the servo on the right does the tilting.

Above you can see how it works. You fit the mechanism on a tripod and put the camera on the tray. And it sort of does the job. The servos are powerful enough to support the camera weight and do the panning and tilting thing. But I don’t like the effect. I had this idea of a camera suspended in the air on a picture and moving from there. And the tilt and pan axes are in different planes, so that the camera moves in a curved path when I don’t want it to. Oh well. Back to the drawing board (or in this case OpenSCAD).

Printers know just when to not work...

/

Met my MEng project students today. The plan was to impress them with a nicely printed overview of the course content. But the printer had other ideas. For the last few weeks it has been waking up at odd times and emptying its ink tanks so that it won’t work when I need to use it. Cunning stuff.

There was plenty of black ink. But no yellow. The thing I was printing had no yellow in it. But the printer refused to play. The online help referred to a monochrome printing mode you could use in this situation, but of course that didn’t work. My plans to impress were in tatters.

The good news is that I managed to figure it out. If you want to use the monochrome mode properly you need to install the “proper” drivers that you get from Brother, rather than the ones that are installed automatically by Windows 11.

And I’ve ordered some more ink. Should be here tomorrow.