I built this quick rig last year using a pre-made camera slider, some plastic I had laying around, and some electronic components. I wanted something simple where I could just put in the amount of time delay and set the camera for the same delay so that it would take a picture when the stepper wasn’t moving; simple yet effective. Read on to check out the movie I made last year using it.
The material used to make the mounting pieces was a cutting board(great stuff to work with) a threaded rod and a long nut that fits the threaded rod. I made two mounting pieces and affixed them to the two pieces of the slider. Thenut for moving the sliding piece is simply glued into place. I used a Sparkfun easy driver to control the stepper and a Arduino Nano to control the easy driver. The code was very simple as it just involved rotating the motor one rotation every predetermined interval. I would correlate the interval with the time-lapse program on my Canon t2i, which is running MagicLantern.
Time Lapse Rig 1
Time Lapse Rig 2
Time Lapse Rig 3
To connect the threaded rod to the motor I used a piece of rubber fuel line I had around. It works really well as it is slightly complaint which is good because nothing about this project is accurate.
Time Lapse Rig 4
Here is a simple tutorial on the easy driver at Bildr.
Camera Mounted
Now onto the video! A little back story: Last year I made a poem/story for my girlfriend for Christmas. I always try to photoshop/implement pictures of her into my projects – its just for fun. I took a bunch of random pictures of her a few days before starting the project; I will do this every so often so she wasn’t wise to what I was up to. I based the story on the pictures to use as many as possible and I turned them into “drawn” images with photoshop. The video is a timelapse of me creating the story. Enjoy!
She loved it.
