Tag Archives: Arduino

Motorising my camera slider – The electronics

In Part 1 of this little adventure, I spoke about the 3D printed parts I created to motorise my camera slider. I plan to make a few revisions to those printed parts in the future, but for now, they’re functional, so I’m leaving them alone for the minute. Now, it’s time to move onto the electronics side of things.

My plan is to power the whole setup using 3 cell LiPo RC batteries. I have a bunch of these from a drone I no longer use, so I figure I should do something with them instead of leaving them to rot.

But I can’t just hook a stepper motor straight into a battery and magically expect it to work. I need other items, too. And that’s where this post comes in.

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LS20031 GPS Module

GPS is something I’ve wanted to play with for a long time, but the cost of GPS modules has always put them way out of reach for just for the sake of having a new toy to play with.

At the moment, however, the good folks over at Cool Components are running a January clearance sale, and this is one of the products in that sale.

There are a couple of other GPS modules included in the sale, but with a massive reduction from £50 to £12, ordering the LS20031 GPS module (10Hz version) was really no choice at all.

10hz_ls20031_gps

I haven’t actually used my Arduino for a good few months, and I don’t think I’ve even reinstalled the software since I rebuilt my main PC a couple of months ago, but I think it’s time to pull the Uno out of its box and start having a play.

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Tiny computers are taking over

I’ve been using and working with x86 based PCs for a little over 21 years now.

I started off with MS-DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0 on a 286.  The 40MB hard drive I had in there was so huge it had to be partitioned across two drive letters as the maximum partition size that MS-DOS 3.3 could see was a whopping 32MB.

I made the natural progression to MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows For Workgroups 3.11, then Windows 95, at which point I learned about networking, and sometime in 1996 I discovered Linux.

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