Time-Lapse Rig Video Tour

This is a quick video tour of my new time-lapse rig, built mostly from stuff I had hanging around in the junk box. The goal is to take time-lapse movies of growing vines, with the camera automatically advancing upwards to follow the growing tips of the plants.

The camera is a Casio QV8000-SX, using the built-in time-lapse mode.
The motor controller is based on a Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 OEM module that I had left over from a previous project. It uses a Scott Edwards Electronics 2x16 serial character LCD module with four button keypad for feedback and input.

The drive motor is from Lynxmotion, and is driving a gearbox made from VEX Robotic Design System pieces that I had left over from when I was a team mentor for the VEX Robotics Competition. It uses two worm gear units at 24:1 each, and one 7:1 spur reduction, for a total ratio of (24x24x7=) 4032:1. This drives a sprocket with a pitch diameter of 0.7 inches, for a linear travel of somewhere around four ten-thousandths of an inch per revolution of the input shaft.

Most of the structure is made from scrap wood, and the grow lights are just compact fluorescent lamps (daylight spectrum) from the hardware store, on a regular electronic lamp timer. The pot is a self-wicking planter made from old soda bottles and plastic storage containers from the discount store.

It's a little bit crude and kludgy in spots, but I tested it extensively at various stages of construction, and it seems to work pretty well. I'm looking forward to running it with an actual plant growing in it, and am starting a fast-growing bean seed or two for the first run. Stay tuned for footage as it grows.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Time-lapse
• motion-control
• camera
• intervalometer