My fully automated macro rig with touchscreen

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kaleun96
Posts: 272
Joined: Sat Oct 20, 2018 3:47 pm
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

My fully automated macro rig with touchscreen

Post by kaleun96 »

I'm relatively new here but have been lurking for the past 6 months or so. During that time I've been digesting a lot of information I've found on here to build my own macro rig. I had a manual setup for a few months last year as I started getting into extreme macro and it wasn't long before I wanted to incorporate an Arduino.

The rail has a 1mm pitch screw and 1:2 gear reduction so with a 200 step/rotation stepper motor I get down to 0.0025mm without even micro-stepping.

Don't pay too much attention to the 10x Olympus on the Sigma 70-300 "Macro", I was just playing around with some test setups.

I was originally going to stick to an OLED and use a remote for controls but touchscreens are just easier to use. Though they take a lot longer to program! I've built a fair amount of functionality and checks and balances into the code without going too crazy. There's a lot more I could do but after 1,200 lines of code and several months work I'm satisfied for now!

VIDEO: https://streamable.com/w1kwm
GitHub code and schematics: https://github.com/camdey/MacroStepper
More photos: https://imgur.com/a/RXsy8df

The setup in all its glory:
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Lou Jost
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Location: Ecuador
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Post by Lou Jost »

Beautiful. Besides all the neat electronic stuff, those industrial-strength magic arms caught my attention. Can you tell us where did you got them?
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mawyatt
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Joined: Thu Aug 22, 2013 6:54 pm
Location: Clearwater, Florida

Post by mawyatt »

Great setup!! Really like your touch screen with the Arduino.

Best,
Research is like a treasure hunt, you don't know where to look or what you'll find!
~Mike
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kaleun96
Posts: 272
Joined: Sat Oct 20, 2018 3:47 pm
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Post by kaleun96 »

Thanks!
Lou Jost wrote:Besides all the neat electronic stuff, those industrial-strength magic arms caught my attention. Can you tell us where did you got them?
Yeah sure they're the SmallRig branded magic arms on Amazon. In fact a lot of the camera cheese plates, the riser, rods, and rod base plate are also SmallRig. They make good quality stuff for a very reasonable price.

The arms suffer from the same issue most magic arms have, if the weight on the arm is perpendicular to the screw thread in an anti-clockwise direction it's going to try unscrew itself from the plates. Aside from that they are great!
Last edited by kaleun96 on Tue Feb 19, 2019 5:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Lou Jost
Posts: 5987
Joined: Fri Sep 04, 2015 7:03 am
Location: Ecuador
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Contact Lou Jost

Post by Lou Jost »

Thanks, I had not known of SmallRig. Sounds like they are worth knowing.
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