Monthly Archives: September 2020

3 posts

Motion Control

I am building a motion control camera system for Stop Motion animation. It’s pretty complicated, I am building it mostly all from parts from Open Builds. Its consisting of four large aluminium pillars supporting two rails. Between those rails is slung a moving gantry, and on that gantry is a vertical mount that can move laterally and vertically. On the end of that, is a pan and tilt mechanism that holds the camera. The whole thing will be motorised and possible to program within the Arco system in Dragonframe.

This is me assembling the aluminium frame work. These parts were found in the barn of a local farm.
Here I am assembling the carriage that runs across the gantry and holds the vertical camera mount.
Here I am adding the carriages to the overhead gantry.
Here I am affixing a motor to one end of the overhead rails.
Here Im measuring the height, and fixing the overhead rails.
Here Im cutting a tread in the end of a beam for adding the carriages
Showing the motor on the overhead gantry and how it will move the carriage via the toothed belt.

Letter in The Wire (again)

So my blog post about Tim Smiths death has been posted in Wire Magazine.


I’m super proud! I wrote to Derek Walmsley the editor, to tell him about Tim, and nagging that they should do an obituary. I suspect it was too late, but he asked if I would like to do it , as a letter. (I suspect so they didn’t have to pay) and I was happy to oblige!

Accidental website re-design.

Ok I clicked something, and boom… all the tiny tweaks I’d done to my website over the years were gone.

So it was time for a new theme. It’s pretty nice, I’m sure you agree, but will need some major fiddling to get it right.

Anyway, after I deleted the Ordo Ab Chao site, I decided to very slightly change my blog a bit in that direction, so some of the old look (the logo mainly) has now turned up here.

Let’s see how it goes?