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Final Project

Revolve 360
Turntable Device for 360 Degree Photography

My project is to make a device which helps for 360 degree product photography. I named it as "Revolve 360". It has many useful applications in 3D imaging, e-comerce websites etc. The below poster will give an over all idea about my project.

I have proposed the idea in the first week of fab academy and I had made a rough sketch of the project. For making a 360 degree view of a product, the product will be placed on the device which will rotate by fixed angles and the camera is kept stationary. The platform will get rotated by a fixed angle and will wait for a while for capturing the image of that instant. This process will continue till the total angle becomes 360 degree. So by merging all the images captured, we can make a 360 degree visual of the product.

Rough sketch of my project The major steps of this project are :

Design

Building the hardware

Making the controller

Making camera remote

Developing GUI

The processes I have gone through are :

3D and 2D Design

Computer controlled machining (Using Shopbot)

3D Printing

Laser cutting

Vinyl Cutting

Electronics Design and Production

Design

I have made some CAD design in the week of Computer Aided Design itself. But it doesn't have proper dimensions and can't be used for machining and cutting. Here is the link for Computer Aided Design week.

I used rhino for the CAD works. I usually use rhino for designing.

Here are some screens shots of the design. It is dificult to take too many screenshots while working, so some are here.

2D design of bottom plates





2D design of bottom plates





See all the parts in 3D here



I have rendered it.



I have a gif i made of the rendered images :P

[Click to collapse]

I have labeled the parts for easy understanding.



Download the design files

Building the hardware

Most of the parts are made from plywood using shopbot. Some are 3D printed and some gears are made using laser cutter from acrylic sheet.
I have labeled the various parts of my device just before , so now you can understand the below pictures easily. First is the bottom most platform. It has a slot for the thrust bearing. I use this thrust bearing inorder to withshtand much weight.

See the bearing placed in the slot.

I also use a normal radial bearing to hold the shaft. If is use the thrust bearing only in this case , there is chance to get the shaft slipped out of bearinf. So i use a normal radial bearing and a holder for it.

Here it has the slot for the motor also.

The entire thing is placed on the bottom plate so that the shaft exactly comes above the thrust bearing. I have put some holes on both the holder and the bottom platform for fixing it properly.

For adjusting the motor position i have given a bolt and nut mechanism.

For aligning the shaft exactly vertical I have put another bearing near to the top platform. A bolder which holds the bearing is fixed below the top fixed platform. This holder and bearing is not a necessary thing it can be avoided. The device will also work without it . But I just included in my design .

The bearing has a different inner dia than the shaft dia. So i 3D printed a coupler which comes in between the shaft and bearing.

For the gears, i used an online gear generator and edited in rhino.

I made the gears in acrylic sheet by laser cutting it.

It is not possible to attach the gears directly on the shafts, so i 3D printed two couplers for the motor and shaft.


Here is the over all mechanism.

When i put it all together, it looked like this.

For the outer cover , i used a plastic sheet. I pasted vinyl on the plastic sheet so that it looks so good. I also cut my logo in vinyl using vinyl cutter and pasted over there.


The rotating platform should be removable easily and should be mounted on the shaft easily. So i fixed a rectangular piece of plywood on the shaft. It is press fit mechanism and it is very tight. (in the figure below there is not bearing holder, i have removed it for some reason)

Here is the final product with top rotating platform.

The controller

For making the controller part, I have gone through three processes, electronics design, electronics production and embedded programming. The micro controller I am using is Atmega 328. The programming language I chose is C . Since I have to control the stepper motor , I have made a small separate board for stepper drivee controller. So total I have a main board and a stepper controller board. In the main ports I have put some ports for following connections

Bluetooth

Xbee

Stepper motor driver

LCD

Joystick

AVR ISP

Here LCD and joystick are optional. Since we can communicate via bluetooth with the help of an android phone or laptop, LCD and joystick can be avoided. But I have put connections for the following because for controlling without a laptop(or PC) they are necessary.
This is the design for main controller.





I milled the board



Soldered the components





I designed another board for stepper driver. I use Pololu A4988 for controlling stepper motor. So I designed the board with some female connectors so that i can plug the A4988 stepper driver in to that. Note that the schematic is not correct as per the labels, but I used the pin so that I can plug the A988 from bottom side of the board. Anyway the board design will be okay





Note that i have included the voltage regulator in board. For driving the motor we need 12V. So my plan is to make a 5V from the 12V and the same can be used for main board also since the vcc and gnd are same. Anyway i have put a switch, if we want to power the micro controller externally the switch will be usefull.
I milled the board and soldered the components.



All parts are connected together.

Camera remote

I need a remote for trigerring the camera. It can be wired or wireless actually but i chose wireless. I have already made the remote in the networking week.

Here is the link for networking week

Programming

The programming labguage i used is C. I already explained what my device to do is rotate for a fixed angle, triger camera , whait for a while and continue this procedure. For this the controller has to know many parameters like

What is the total degree of rotation

What is the anfle for each single rotation

How many number of pictures to take

Up to what time it should wait for the camra to click

So we have to communicate all these parameters to the controller. Here i am using serial communication over bluetooth. So i have send all these values as a packet. For this i have made a protocol so that the controller will accept and understand a data with this protocol.
The packet is lik

        
        
        $R360<Total angle><Number of snaps to take><Delay time><Direction>
        
        
        

I can explain one by one

Total angle
This is the total angle in degree. Usually it is 360 for 360 degree photography. If you dont want 360 degree but only 180, then you can give 180 there. It must be in degrees and should have 3 characters.

Number of snaps
This is the total number of snaps you want to take. It should be in two digit.

Delay time
This is the time delay for the controller to wait for camera click. I put this option because when the shutter speed of the camera is varied extremely the delay time should also be changed. This should be also in two digit.
For example if it is 1 Second the digit to send is 10. If its 1.5 second then it is 15. This is the format.

Direction
This is for which direction it has to rotate, if it is clockwise then the character to be sent is C, and if it is anticlockwise send A.

An example Here is an example. If we want a 360degree visual with 30 snaps with 1s time delay with rotation in clockwise direction, then the packet to send is

        
        $R3603603010C
        
        
        

Right now i send this using a serial terminal. But my plan is to make a GUI which will take all the parameters as input , it will make the packet from the parameters and will send it over bluetooth.

Here is the code written in C for my controller

Final Product

Putting all together i made it working. See the hero shot of my device with a product placed on it.





I made a setup with some lamps and lights for the image capyuring. Settingthe light without shadow was bit difficult for me. I could n't make it properly actually.






Now see the video to know how it works.



Now we will get a lot of pictures (here in this case, it is 30). Here it has a green background we can remove it using photoshop, but i dint do it now. The best idea is to chose a white colour platform and background. We dont have a white vinyl sheet, that is why i used green.



By merging it we can make the final 360 degree view. My plan was to make a tool in python for merging, but i dint get time , but i will make for sure. Now i used an online tool called Sirv.com.

Click and drag