Floppy Drive Pan Cam

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Milan Gajic has made a cool Web controlled floppy drive powered pan cam. Some simple right and left 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.

Note: It seems that the cam only works with Internet Explorer at this time.

“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.”

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5 Comments



  2. Nice. are you planning on cutting the floppy drive apart to make a more compact version of this? if so, will you be posting it here?


  3. Hi ghostly!

    As a matter of fact that was the original idea. On my website, there is a project
    where I experimented how far I could go with dissasembling a floppy and stil be able
    to use the motor.
    The problem is that after you take the motor out of its casing it
    just doesn’t work well enough. It’s ‘a mechanical thing’ …
    Also there is a IR-gate that makes the motor stop, and you’d have to find a way around that.
    I decided not to go there, due to the fact that the components just get too damn fragile once you
    take the floppydrive apart.

    But … and I must It’s a big BUT … having built the FloppyPan I did get some Idea’s
    how to solve some problems that arose on the previous project … hmmmm … you know what … I just might take a crack at it again when I find some free time …

    Thnx for the inspiration ghostly. May all your hacks prosper … 🙂

    Greetz,
    Milan



  5. nice i checked it 🙂 it works

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