The angle of rotation of the tilt servo can be addressed absolutely by the Arduino sketch – tell it to go to 93° and it will. But neither the sketch nor the servo know in what orientation the servo is mounted, so one of the last things to do when configuring a Saturn V Rig is to establish this correct physical relationship. I run a sketch until it tells the tilt servo to point the camera straight down and then stop the sketch. I then attach the camera tray to the spline of the tilt servo so the camera will point straight down.
The spline at the end of the servo axle has 15 teeth which engage with a socket on the camera tray. Each tooth represents 24 degrees of rotation (360/15=24), so adjusting the absolute aim of the camera cannot be done with any more precision than that. The best possible adjustment may not cause the camera to point straight down when the sketch tells it to. That’s okay because in each complete pan/tilt regime, the nadir will be included in all eight or nine photos taken in the lowest tilt position. So there is plenty of nadir coverage, but if you wanted to use those photos for mapping, it would be nice to have them as vertical as possible.
The exact tilt angle can be adjusted in hardware or software. The socket on the camera tray can be rotated, but this means drilling two new bolt holes. The easiest fix is to edit the sketch so that the lowermost tilt position makes the camera point at the nadir. The tilt positions are established in three arrays at the very beginning of the sketch. Change the last number in an array from the current value (originally 20) to 10 or 30 or whatever works. This will change the increment between the last two tilt positions, but there is lots of overlap built in so it won’t matter much.
The beta rigs I shipped all seemed to point pretty close to vertical when they should, but it’s a good thing to check if you want the lowest tilt to point exactly vertical. If you have to remove the camera tray to drill a hole for the tripod screw, you will have to run the sketch to get the tilt servo into its lowest position when you replace the tray. Select Mode 4 for this because it tilts first, then pans.
The angle of rotation of the tilt servo can be addressed absolutely by the Arduino sketch – tell it to go to 93° and it will. But neither the sketch nor the servo know in what orientation the servo is mounted, so one of the last things to do when configuring a Saturn V Rig is to establish this correct physical relationship. I run a sketch until it tells the tilt servo to point the camera straight down and then stop the sketch. I then attach the camera tray to the spline of the tilt servo so the camera will point straight down.
The spline at the end of the servo axle has 15 teeth which engage with a socket on the camera tray. Each tooth represents 24 degrees of rotation (360/15=24), so adjusting the absolute aim of the camera cannot be done with any more precision than that. The best possible adjustment may not cause the camera to point straight down when the sketch tells it to. That’s okay because in each complete pan/tilt regime, the nadir will be included in all eight or nine photos taken in the lowest tilt position. So there is plenty of nadir coverage, but if you wanted to use those photos for mapping, it would be nice to have them as vertical as possible.
The exact tilt angle can be adjusted in hardware or software. The socket on the camera tray can be rotated, but this means drilling two new bolt holes. The easiest fix is to edit the sketch so that the lowermost tilt position makes the camera point at the nadir. The tilt positions are established in three arrays at the very beginning of the sketch. Change the last number in an array from the current value (originally 20) to 10 or 30 or whatever works. This will change the increment between the last two tilt positions, but there is lots of overlap built in so it won’t matter much.
The beta rigs I shipped all seemed to point pretty close to vertical when they should, but it’s a good thing to check if you want the lowest tilt to point exactly vertical. If you have to remove the camera tray to drill a hole for the tripod screw, you will have to run the sketch to get the tilt servo into its lowest position when you replace the tray. Select Mode 4 for this because it tilts first, then pans.