I present to you the cheapest camera or object stabilizer in the whole world !
A 2-axis gimbal that keeps an object steady in a certain position despite the movement of the base on which it is mounted. This means when the base keeps changing its position constantly, the object will remain stable and there won’t be any change in its position.
It all started with my new ADXL345 and I thought to myself why not try
and build a hand-held gimbal at home since these things are rather
costly out there.
So, I fired up max and as usual started working on
the digital prototype or the blueprint. I had a few servos left from the
previous project that I worked on and two of them were enough for this
simple stabilizer. And I have learnt from my mistakes ! Knowing that
these servos won't be able to put up with so much, I designed the frame
in a way that would fairly distribute the load away from the motor. With
all this in mind, I roughly designed the whole thing and tried to make
it somewhat visually appealing ! Here are some of the final renders.
With the prototype done, it was time to build the actual thing !
This
project, I'm upgrading from the whole cardboard thing. I'm going to use
some industry grade lamination fiber as the building blocks to make
this.
It was a nightmare to cut these things using the carbon knife.
it's a whole lot more effort than cardboard but at least it's
lightweight and not as fragile !
I started by cutting out the
different pieces of the frame individually, later I would seal them
altogether. Meanwhile, I got myself some extra tools to make my life a
bit more easy !
I spent the next few days putting all the pieces
together using different kinds of strong household adhesive. I tried the
glue gun previously but it didn't work.
Anyway, I build the basic frame, sealed the servo in place and screwed the hands together ! Worked
on the pivot points a lot to make the motions more smooth and to make
sure the loads were properly distributed !
I took a little bit of
time to wire it up and test it. And there seemed to be some problem
with the joints ! It was finally time to deviate from the whole
blueprint !
I changed the design a bit to solve the problem and make it more strong and efficient !
With
this problem solved, I kept building and testing. Testing and building
for the next few days ! It took surprisingly longer to get the whole
thing done.
It was looking so good ! But that's not all - I
needed to connect the sensors, program the Arduino and do all the wiring
and stuffs.
Step 1. The coding part !
I connected everything up
in the prototype board and wrote a draft program. When I started up
everything for the first time, it did work well but it was so rough that
I barely could hold it in my hand ! I played a but with the sensitivity
and things were looked kinda bright.
So, I moved on with the wiring part.
I
used a small breadboard for the sensor and the power distribution and
shoved it in one of the shelf I made. And the Arduino went underneath
that !
And then I tested it ! It was horrible.
I couldn't
understand. I thought maybe it's because some of the wires are loose
since I'm shoving it in ? So, I made a shelf outside and put the sensor
there. But I had no luck.
Then it occurred to me, the janky
motion and the reaction force was moving the whole base structure along
with the sensor which was in turn Trying to stabilize it repeating the
whole cycle again. So, I needed some kind of a error reduction mechanism
and along with that I needed to work on an algorithm which can smooth
out the motion like butter !
That's when I realized, This was on a whole another level.
I spend days to work out the math and code this part !
But after all of this tedious and fun stuff, my gimbal was finally ready ! And it looked fine.
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