Yoon Chee Tuck – watercolor artist, seascape, landscape, malaysia, sea, river, water

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Making a Video Camera Boom

Nov02
by Thomas Yoon Chee Tuck on November 2, 2020 at 12:19 am
Posted In: DIY

When shooting videos of my diy or cnc projects, it was difficult to get closeup shots using my normal camera mounted on a tripod. I needed some equipment that can bring my camera up close to what I was doing. Very often I needed to shoot a scene from behind me so that what I could see would be what the video audience would see.

I didn’t have the luxury of owning a fancy camera with zoom lens, so the next thing I could do was to extend my camera right into the middle of the action. The use of a boom for lighting or microphone seemed to be what I needed. What I needed to do was to mount a camera at the end of a boom instead of lights or microphone.

Although the arrangement was a bit flimsy, I took extra precautions to let any vibration settle down before actually taking a shot or video. It worked nicely, avoiding camera shake and gave better results than hand holding the camera.

I had a piece of base taken from a floor stand fan which I had cannibalized previously. It was quite sturdy, being weighed down by a specially shaped container of water at the bottom. The motor and fan had already been removed and dismantled for some other purposes and what was left was the base and a vertical column of steel pipe. Being heavy was a plus point here because that would provide good stability.

I copied the concept design from a popular portable light boom stand which was mounted on a tripod. I didn’t need to carry it about, so I did not need a foldable tripod. The existing heavy base worked even better than a tripod. What I particularly liked was the concept of a smaller diameter tube fitting into larger diameter tube for space saving. It looks neat. The original design used molded plastic and threaded inserts for their clamps. I replaced these by using wood pieces reinforced by steel wires. At weak points, I reinforced the joints by epoxy resin and nuts/bolts. The round extension tubes were taken from thin walled steel tubes used for curtain rails.

I used my movable gantry cnc machine to cut out the slots in the trunnion and holes in the other pieces of clamping pieces. During the testing of the clamps, I found that some of the wooden pieces tend to fracture. I overcame this tendency by putting up wire reinforcements across the wood grains, and sometimes by the use of thin bolts and nuts.

The base did not come with any wheels, so it was sometimes difficult to move around. Since I had some castor wheels available, I fixed four of them at the base. The actual fitting of the wheels needed some figuring out in order to fit, because some parts were actually hollow and contained water. The plastic molded parts were quite thin – about 3 mm, and were curved, sloping and were not flat. By cutting some pieces of plywood at a gradient and shaped to fit in to the curved corners, I was able to position the wheel supports at the four ends of the base, and secure them by screws. With the castor wheels in place, the video boom was able to be moved around rather easily.



└ Tags: camera, camera boom, camera shake, castor wheels, clamps, closeups, cnc, DIY, movable gantry cnc machine, photography, projects, stand fan, tripod, trunnion, video boom
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Protractor from Aluminium Disk

Oct02
by Thomas Yoon Chee Tuck on October 2, 2020 at 9:08 pm
Posted In: DIY

Sometimes I would come across situations when I would wish I had a protractor to measure angles in my projects. I had been using transparent plastic protractors all these while. They were cheap. Unfortunately, these were rather soft and could get scratched very easily. Some of them were brittle and would end up as broken pieces when I was not careful. Then I would have to buy another one. What a nuisance! And I would not have a protractor available when I needed to check an angle. What a frustration!

Although they were cheap, the diy nature in me wanted to create one for myself out of available materials that I had on hand. After all, I don’t use it very often. Well, I had polished aluminium hard drive aluminium disk available that I picked up sometime ago. And most important of all, I had a cnc machine that I could use for engraving.

Creating the outline of the protractor and its graduated lines was easily done with my Autocad LT 2000 drawing software. The challenge was to engrave the numbers, because after the lines were drawn and file saved as a .dxf file, it was to be converted to a gcode file by another software called dxf2gcode. The gcode file would then be translated by the cnc machine into movements for the engraving.

However, the text created by my autocad drawing software could not be converted to a path by the other software. It was simply not recognized.

I overcome this problem by drawing lines to represent the numbers. Lines were recognized. My workaround was to imitate LED digital displays, the numbers being consisting a couple of lines arranged accordingly. I just needed to draw lines to represent the numbers in my drawing program. Took me a longer time than just pressing on the number buttons on the keyboard, but eventually I was able to complete all the numbers around the protractor. The drawing software also allowed me to display the numbering spaced 10 degrees apart and also to adjust for different sizes to suit.

The video show the project of making a protractor out of an aluminium disk.



└ Tags: angles, autocad, cnc machine, digital display, DIY, drawing software, dxf2gcode, gcode, hard disk, path, projects, protractor
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Recent Posts

  • Vise Repair for Portable Vise
  • Connecting External Supply to Power Screwdriver
  • Cartoon Nativity Drawing and Coloring
  • From Floppy Drive to Movable Gantry CNC Machine – Movable Gantry CNC Machine 25
  • Making a Video Camera Boom

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