Battery Powered Turntable for Shooting Video

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A while ago I modified an old electric TV stand to become a motorized turntable which I'll use to shoot some video.

The key problem was that this TV stand was not designed for a full 360° turn. In order to overcome this issue I removed the inner gear and replaced it with a new 3D printed version.

Now this was able to rotate a full turn. But that project was still is not finished... until now. I had to hook up some external power supply in order to let it turn.

But this project is about replacing some external power supply with an Arduino powered controller box which has a neat little display and a rotary knob to easily set things up. Also the entire unit has a rechargeable battery with a charge and protection circuit!

The inside seems pretty messy. But that is for a reason. I wanted to make this case as small as possible without making a custom PCB. So I did not put any pin headers in place but instead directly soldered small wires from one pin to another.

This assembly also features an optical rotary encoder which I salvaged from an old desktop printer. It is currently not in use by this firmware. But this will be later used to do stuff like PID, running synchronized with a motorized slider or simply to precisely rotate to a target angle.

I had a ton of fun making this project. And I hope you find this interesting!

Cheers and happy hacking :)