3-Axis Camera Slider (2040 V-slot extrusion)

This is my 3-axis, motion control, camera slider I designed for my DSLR Canon EOS 250D (EOS Rebel SL3).

The Project video is on my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/1FfB7cLkUyQ

Here is a quick overview of the components and how the project works. There is an Arduino Nano as the brain controlling everything and monitoring the inputs. The three Nima 17 stepper motors are controlled by TMC2208 stepper driver boards. When combining the stepper motor’s step angle, the microstepping mode of the driver boards and the gear ratios of the pan and tilt axis you get a precision of 0.0133° and 0.0369° respectively (Stepper motors move 1.8° per full step, microstepping divides this by 16, the pan axis has a gear ratio of 144:17 and the tilt has a ratio of 64:21). The slider carriage moves using a 36 tooth timing pulley with a 2GT timing belt on 2040 V-slot aluminium extrusion. This gives the slider has a positional precision of approximately 0.0225mm.

In 16th microstepping mode, axis speeds are limited to about 20 degrees per second for the pan, 15 degrees per second for the tilt and 20mm per second for the slider. This limit is due to the software/microcontroller speed which is only able to produce ~4000 step pulses per second for the 3 stepper motors. In half stepping mode speeds about eight times higher should be possible depending on acceleration profiles and camera weight.

The pan, tilt and slider are almost completely silent in 16th microstepping mode. In half stepping…