Milan Gajic created a cool web controlled floppy drive powered pan cam. Simple left and right commands on this page allow anyone on the net to have the floppy drive move the camera around to get look out of Milan’s window.

The goal of the game was to make a webcam panning unit out of things I had lying around on my table. Then this would be made accesible via a web interface, so that a person watching the webcam images could move the camera. A floppy drive, as I discovered earlier, has a easily usable steppermotor and a builtin controller. The idea is to use the linear movement of the Read/Write head of the floppy drive to rotate a camera mount. To do this I connected the RW-head to a point on the camera mount that was slightly off axis. The distance bitween the axis of the camera mount to the point where force is applied should be about half of full linear movement of the RW-head.

Floppy Pan Testing

Floppy Pan – Panning Test

via Hackedgadgets

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 1:12 am and is filed under DIY, Mods, Webcam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.