Turn Your Old Inkjet Printer Into a Motorized Camera Slider

Inkjet printers are the most notoriously fickle pieces of technology that the average person interacts with regularly. It takes roughly a week for the typical printer to fail catastrophically and end up in the recycling bin or thrift store. Even if your printer is some sort of prodigy and doesn’t break, it’ll run out of ink and purchasing additional ink is more expensive than just replacing the printer. The result is that used printers are very easy to find for free. They’re also full of useful parts, and Patrick Yoon has a video demonstrating how to build a motorized camera slider with those parts.

This is just a simple single-axis camera slider, which means it can’t rotate or tilt. You won’t be getting any truly complex shots, but even just moving your camera along a short track can add a lot of visual interest to a video clip. The length of the slider is dependent on your donor printer, and will most likely be less than a foot. That’s because the camera will be riding on the linear rail from the printer, and that is only intended to cover the width of a typical piece of paper. If, however, you have access to a large format printer, that could be much longer.

You’ll start by disassembling your printer to retrieve the useful parts. The only parts you’ll be using are the linear rail, the mount it’s attached to, the carriage that the inkjet printing head is mounted to, and the belt to move that. You’ll 3D print stands for the rail mount to sit on and a platform on top of the carriage. Your camera will attach to that platform using the adhesive mount of your choice. To move the carriage back and forth, you can use a small servo motor controlled by an Arduino board. Yoon added two limit switches, a button to make the carriage move in each direction, and a button to start things up. This camera slider won’t make you the next Stanley Kubrick, but it could add some dynamic appeal to your YouTube videos.