In 2014 I wanted to a camera gimbal. At the time, many great offerings were too expensive (~$500-700) and cheaper products had questionable quality and performance.
I took it upon myself to see if I could design and create my own. My girlfriend's dad (now father in law) is a machinist and was allowed to work on personal projects when off hours. Having no experience with using CAD software I was given access to a machine with SolidWorks and spent a week or so designing the various parts you see here in this repository.
- 6061T6 Aluminium Sheet .190" thick
- 6061T6 Aluminium Sheet .750" diameter .125" thick wall
- M3 machine screws
- 685 2RS Premium ABEC3 Bearing 5 x 11 x 5 mm
- 3 x Turnigy HD 5208 Brushless Gimbal Motor
- Turnigy 2200mAh 3S 25C Lipo Pack
- EvvGC 1.3 Gimbal Controller Board with IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit)
- EvvGC 1.3 Gimbal Controller Board with IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit)
- EvvGC Firmware
- EvvGC Electronics
- Images:
- Videos:
I didn't have a feedback loop of creating a design and prototyping it before finalizing the design. I pretty much relied on intuition (common sense), referencing other designs found online, the simulation of the assembled parts in SolidWorks, and eventually a final review with my father in law before finally machining the parts.
Although my design worked. I feel like I could've gotten a better result if I were able to actually have prototypes of each design iteration before "completing the project".
CNC Machining is not a process where you drop a material into a machine, press a button, and your part magically appears.
There's still quite a bit of human intervention in the process.
- Understanding of materials and their use cases.
- Feasibility of the creation of the part(s) based on the design and the machining process(steps) that is necessary to achieve the end result.
- Programming of the processes(steps) needed to create the part(s)
- Precision of material and machine setup process
One of the primary goals of the project was to keep costs down. I think I ended up spending ~$225 total to create the gimbal. The cost would've been significantly higher if I had to pay for a machinist to machine my part. Due to machine time and time spent programming the operations to create the parts.
I was able to cut costs on materials by
- Not having multiple prototypes and only machining when the design was "finalized"
- Not picking a more established gimbal controller
- I chose the EvvGC gimbal controller due to the cost of the electronics (~$45) and that it was opensource
- The other gimbal controller available at the time was the AlexMos SimpleBGC Controller ($150) and the various clone boards available at the time ($50)
- I didn't want to take a chance on the clone boards due to reports on questionable compatibility on the software to interface with the controller at the time
Although I wanted the gimbal to magically stabilize my camera upon initial setup, I quickly found that there is more configuration to be done to get everything working perfectly.
- Your gimbal must be balanced, to a reasonable degree, even when it's powered off for it to perform at a reasonable level.
- While the controller can compensate for everything, it's better to think about the gimbal setup and the controller as an aid to the operator rather than a tool to compensate for the imbalance and instability of the entire system
- Motor choice must match the load that you plan on putting on the gimbal system.
- Luckily, I chose motors that were rated higher for the load I was putting on each axis of my gimbal. Had I had decided to choose lower rated motors to cut costs, I think I would've run into issues when mounting heavier cameras like a DSLR.
- Motor PID tuning is delicate process
- I may have had difficulty in this area due to the fact that I cut costs and chose an open source gimbal controller. I had a lot of trial and error when tuning the PID settings for the controller to properly control the rates at which the motors compensated for the movement across axes.