Today, I'm going to show you how to build a linear slider motor with speed control and
USB power for both time-lapse and normal speed videos for as little as $55 but for the deluxe
version around $85.90.
First of all, I'll just give you some of the drawbacks to using a DIY solution.
For starters, it's relatively heavy.
It's also less customizable than a pre-fabricated unit.
A big drawback is that it doesn't use stepping motion, so the commercial units will do a
movement-stop-movement-stop action that ensures that each image is captured sharply, which
is really only important for nighttime time lapses.
However, there's a major, major benefit to doing a DIY time-lapse slider motor and that
is that it's cheap and it's actually pretty easy.
The whole thing will only take you an hour or less to make.
This is what you're going to end up with once you're finished.
Here, you've got your self-contained portable stable unit which has speed control through
a pulse width modulator, which is safe, reliable, doesn't cause any damage to the motors, unlike
voltage control, and you can turn it down to extremely low speed so you can make each
motor run at as little as 10% of their normal operating speeds.
I've got a 2 RPM motor here, which can take you down to speeds as slow as 1.5cm per minute,
which is extremely, extremely good for time laps.
You can even possibly get it a bit lower.
Over on the other side, we've got a 70 RPM motor for doing normal speed motion across
the slider, switch to turn the monitor off, adjust the speed, and 2 RPM.
So for $55, I'm only suggesting you put in the time-lapse motor because obviously that's
the most important one.
For about $90, you can also chuck in the extra bits like the 70 RPM motor for normal speed.
USB port up at the top, and you probably can't see it, but it's got a USB port, five volts
you can charge, all of your gadgets, we're talking iPads, phones, and in my case, a fan,
which might seem ridiculous, but a fan is actually extremely important to me.
I've done a lot of time lapses in cold environments and I always seem to get fog and condensation
on the lens.
So having a little fan, which you can power off this thing, and the battery has enough
charge to run this thing for probably a week or two straight, will create airflow circulation
around the lens and stop any condensation from building up.
Drill charge, which is what spools your line.
Brackets mounted onto the slider, I'm suggesting you get L brackets for flashes, which come
with one of these, which allows you to screw it straight onto the slider, and over here
a little 1.3 amp power, 12 volt battery, which will last a ridiculously long time, and it's
actually kind of useful in the field for charging your bits and pieces with the USB power.
So this is what it's all going to end up looking like.
For $55, you can do it without the battery.
Now the battery, you don't need a battery, you can run it off any old 12 to 14 volt thing.
I'm suggesting a drill battery, a battery powered drill battery, and so for $55, scrap
USB, scrap 70 RPM, use your own battery, and you can have a time lapse motor with speed
control for about $85.90 bucks, chuck in the normal speed motor, put in USB, a little fan,
and a dedicated battery for the unit.
Alright, so the final thing that I did with this little project was, since I'm recently
handy with a sewing machine, jump on and make a little carry bag for it.
To start with, I'm just going to tell you about some of the parts that you'll need to
make this.
Here we have a 12 volt DC 2 RPM, that's 2 revolutions per minute, geared high torque
motor.
This is what will do your time lapse motion.
Over here, we've got a 70 RPM 12 volt DC geared motor.
Now in hindsight, I'd say go 60 RPM and get a high torque version.
This is what will do your normal speed motion.
Up here at the top, we've got a 12 volt USB unit that will allow you to power things.
In my case, I was particularly interested in running it for a small USB fan, which I
can then use to circulate air in front of the lens, which stops condensation building
up, which I've had a lot of trouble with doing time lapses in cold climates.
This is a 5 volt unit, can also charge things like your phone, your iPad, anything that's
USB powered.
But in my case, I was interested to run a little fan off it, which gets circulation
around the lens and stops the build up of condensation.
If you choose to, you'll need a 12 volt battery.
Now any 12 volt battery will do, but in this case, I used a small little 1.3 amp power
unit.
Now 1.3 amp hours is actually a lot of battery power.
1.3 amp hours will run that little USB fan for about probably a week straight or more.
It'll also give you a lot of run time on your motors.
Now what pulls it all together is this, which is a standard drill chuck.
Now the chuck goes onto the shaft for each motor and can easily be changed.
Here you'll see some fishing line, just normal fishing line, in this case I've used braided
because it doesn't have memory, so it just holds around the chuck a bit easier.
And so you'll be attaching the chuck there.
Here we've got a little beam that supports, that's got two guides.
Now what these do is feed the line through onto the drill chuck, but at the end I'll
tell you a better way to do this.
Of course, one thing to note is that this is the first time I've made it.
In hindsight, I would have done things a little differently, and I'll tell you about how I
would have done it a little differently at the end of this tutorial.
Down here we've got an L bracket.
I used a big heavy steel unit, but if you were doing this, I'd recommend you just get
two L brackets, which are normally used for flashes, the cheapest chips, and I'll give
you a link to buy them shortly.
Holding down the motors, we've got just some brackets that are normally used for PVC pipe,
cheapest chips.
One thing I should note is that I put a bit of foam underneath them to give them a bit
of extra grip on the motors.
It's all contained inside a Jiffy box, which is just a tough plastic container.
On top of the Jiffy box, we've got something called a pulse wave modulator.
What this does is control the speed by turning the motor on and off so quickly that you can't
even notice it.
It means that it doesn't cause any damage to the motor, and a really effective way of
slowing down the speed of these units to whatever you desire.
We've just got two little switches, one that just does on-off, I use that to turn on and
off the USB, and another one here which does on, off, on.
That will switch between the 2 RPM and the 70 RPM motor.
The last thing that you'll need is a 1N5404 diode.
These cost all of about 20 cents.
The reason you'll need one of these is because when you're using a pulse wave modulator,
which is what we're using to control the speed, when you turn down the pulse wave modulator
really low, so it's going extremely slow, the actual motor itself, if you stall the
motor, you can get a spike of voltage.
What this will do is just stop that back spike of voltage from doing any damage.
To build this time-lapse motor, you're going to need a few tools, and I'll just assume
that you have these things.
You'll need a drill for starters, you'll also need some spade bits, you'll need a pair
of pliers, preferably a soldering iron, although you can do it without it, it's just a little
more difficult.
Probably a Dremel or even just a file would do, the only reason you need that is because
I had to grind down some of the little raised edges in the Jiffy box, which is the black
unit that it's all contained in, and I just had to grind those parts down to make space.
Now, if you're not worried about where your little parts are located, then you don't need
a Dremel, really it's optional, and if you work hard enough you can do it with a file
anyway.
You'll also need a few miscellaneous bolts and screws, you'll need some wire, some cable
to power the whole unit, anything will do, you can even cut up an old extension cord
and just pull the wires out of that, and you'll also need some fishing line to put on the chuck,
which is what will pull the slider unit across the slider.
We'll just go into a little more detail about the parts that you'll need, so I've already
mentioned most of the parts that you'll need, but what I didn't mention is the total costing.
Now you've got two options here, you can make a basic unit that will just do time lapse
speeds, so won't do normal speeds, without USB power, and also without purchasing a dedicated
battery, so you'll have to have some kind of 12, 14 volt battery, you can run it off
a car battery, you can even run it off a 14 volt drill battery, no problem at all.
To do a basic unit that just does time lapses, it'll cost you about $55, now if you want
to do a more sophisticated unit that will also, sorry that includes speed control, so
that will do time lapsing with speed control, if you want to do a more sophisticated unit
with a dedicated battery, and a second motor so that you can do normal speed slider shots
as well, then that'll cost you about $85, $90, a large proportion of that cost is actually
just the battery, which costs a fair bit of money.
I'm not going to go into great detail about where to locate each of the motors and the
parts, because really it'll depend on the size jiffy box you get, I'm not saying you
have to get this exact size, you can get any size you want, in fact the smaller the better,
so I put this one in a larger 200mm x 120mm x 60mm unit, but I actually recommend that
you get a much smaller 160mm x 95mm x 53mm unit, I think that you'll be able to fit all
of the parts in there, and obviously the smaller it is, the more portable it is, the better
it is.
You'll see here that I arranged the motors, so that on one side there was the very slow
geared to RPM motor to do time lap shots, and on the other side was the faster geared
70 RPM motor that would do your normal motion shots.
Now the idea was that you'd use your chuck, and you could easily change it from one shaft
to the other shaft to do your shots, whether you want it to do time lapse or normal speed.
Now in hindsight, I don't think that was the best way to do it, if I did it again I'd
strongly recommend that you have your motors angled 90 degrees to the base, and you'd have
your shafts coming out the bottom, so if you think about it, your slide is here, it's running
top to bottom, and your camera is moving up like this along the slider, facing out this
way.
It's much smarter to have the shaft coming out the bottom, and so that way your chuck
is spooling the line like this, and it can be directly in front of the actual camera
itself.
Now one problem that I've had is that I basically have to have a guide here, so what this does,
this guide feeds the line onto the spool.
Now without that guide, the unit just won't work, however if you can mount your chuck
that's spooling the line underneath the unit, and to do that all you have to do is have
your L bracket come out a bit lower, you can have it directly in front of the actual camera
itself, and it basically means that it will spool perfectly without the use of any guide.
Much better way to do it, and I think there's enough space down there to actually have both
of the motor shafts coming out the bottom.
So I definitely recommend you do that when you're making yours.
It also means you can scrap this bit of metal that I've used to make the guides for the
motors, reducing the weight, making it a smaller unit.
One of the important steps in the process is attaching the 1N5404 diode in the outlet
part from the pulse wave modulator.
So sounds complicated, it's actually really simple.
Basically the pulse wave modulator is the thing which controls the speed, and the diode
is what stops any damage happening to the pulse wave modulator should the engine stall
because you've reduced the speed so low.
In practice you've got your pulse wave modulator here, you've got the inlet from the battery,
and the out from the pulse wave modulator itself going to the unit, in this case it's
our motors, flipping it over, obviously a little bit messy, but excuse the mess, we've
got the outlet positive and the outlet negative, and in the middle we've got the 1N5404 diode.
Now the important thing to note here is that the grey section of the diode is closest to
the positive line.
The long black section of the diode goes on the negative outlet of the line.
So what I'm just going to do is solder those parts on, and I'll show you a little close
up after I'm done.
What I've done in here is I've installed the 12 volt USB input here, which is super easy,
it was just a matter of using a spade bit to drill a hole and then just bolting it down
here and here.
I've bolted down with a little bracket the 70 RPM motor, which of course I'm suggesting
you use a 60 RPM high torque one, which will be bigger, and over here I've just bolted
down the 2 RPM 12 volt high torque motor, which was used for the time lapse, and this
one used for the normal speed, and I've just soldered those connections on.
To be honest, you don't even have to do that, believe me, I'm not good with electronics,
I have no idea what I'm doing, and you'd be amazing how well things can work when you
really just have no idea what you're doing, so I don't really worry about it too much,
I soldered it on, I don't know how to solder, I just kind of winged it, I'm sure you can
work it out.
What we're going to do now is wire the time lapse motor up, now right now it looks like
a complete mess, but I can tell you it's not as complicated as it looks.
Basically what you've got is your power coming in from the battery, which is these two lines
here and I've just drilled little holes to get that through, comes out here, here we've
got the pulse width modulator, we've got the power coming in from the source, which in
this case is going to be the battery, and then we've got the power coming out.
Now the power coming out is going to go through a switch, which the switch will determine
whether the power is off, or going to the fast motor or the slow motor, we've got a
separate switch which is going to control the USB port.
Now with the pulse width modulator we're actually running the power straight into the modulator,
and then the power is coming out, and it's where the power is coming out and it's going
into the switch, that's what's going to control the on off, because our switch is an on off
on switch, which means that it can obviously be in an off state, but it can also go and
switch between the power going to whichever motor we choose, so the 2rpm motor or the
70rpm motor.
With the USB port we're going to run the power from the battery into the switch, and
then the switch will have an on off state for the USB port.
So we now know where everything is going to go, it's just a matter of putting it all together.
This cord here, as I mentioned, is the one coming from the battery, so it's the negative
from the battery.
Now basically we can just hook up all of our negatives together, so this is the negative
coming in, this is the negative going to the pulse width modulator, and this is the negative
coming from the USB port over here.
We need to put them all together, in this case I've used a little crimp, but you can
use anything, you can even just twist them together and put some electrical take over
the top, and that'll work just fine.
The next thing we need to do is connect the positive power, and to do that we're going
to take the positive from the battery, we're going to connect it to the positive into the
pulse width modulator, because the power is always going to the pulse width modulator,
the only difference of the pulse width modulator, the way the state is changed to go to the
motors comes from the outlet from the pulse width modulator, which we're going to hook
into the on off on switch.
In terms of the USB port, we're going to run power straight from the battery, as I mentioned
we've already got the negative going straight to the battery, and we're going to run the
positive into the on off switch, and then we'll have the positive from the USB port going
straight into the on state for the switch.
I know it still looks like a complete mess, but it's actually simple like I said before,
and I'll just talk you through the why's that we've got going on here.
So the important ones, here we've got our power coming directly from the battery, positive
red, negative black.
The power from the battery comes and goes straight through into the on off switch for
the USB, so it goes into the center connector for the switch, and then the power comes out
to the USB port from either of the side ones, it doesn't matter.
It can then be controlled by obviously flicking the switch, so power comes in, it's controlled
by the switch on off directly into the USB.
The other, so the positives from the battery also comes straight through and goes into
the pulse width modulator.
From there, it will come out, go into the 1N5404 diode, and it will go into this switch,
but I'll cover that in a sec, for now let's talk about what our negatives are doing.
So the negative is coming from the battery here, it's going straight into the USB, so
negatives just hooked up straight from the battery into the USB.
It's also coming straight into the pulse width modulator, which is going, so it's coming
in here around straight into the pulse width modulator.
Over here with the pulse width modulator, we'll talk a little bit about the actual motors
themselves now, so the power and so the positive and the negative are coming into the pulse
width modulator, they're coming directly from the battery.
What happens next is when it comes out of the pulse width modulator, the negative comes
straight out through the 1N5404 diode directly connected to both of the motors.
So the negative comes straight out through the diode, straight to both of the motors.
The last thing we have to do is connect the positive from the out from the pulse width
modulator, which is this one here, it goes through the 1N5404 diode, and it will go down
here into the center of the on-off-on switch, and we'll also hook up the positives for each
of the motors to either side, that will then allow us to switch between the motors, center
will be off, left will be on for the 70 RPM, right will be on for the 2 RPM.
Okay, so we're getting pretty close now, everything's wired up, what we've got is just that last
step, which is down here, although it's rather messy, as you can see, I'm actually no good
whatsoever at soldering, you don't even have to solder it, you can just wrap it around
and put some electrical tape around it, it really doesn't have to be that neat, once it's
inside it's solid, it's not going to move around, you'll be fine.
So, that last step was taking the positive out from the pulse width modulator, which
is this cord here, remembering that we already had our negative hooked up to go straight
to the motors, and we've taken that positive out, and down here in the center of the switch
we've connected the positive out from the pulse width modulator into the center, and
then on either side we've got the positive from each motor coming in, so we've got the
positive from the 2RPM coming in here on the right, and the positive from the 70RPM coming
in here on the left, that just means, as you'll be able to see in just one second, that we'll
be able to by flicking the switch, so it's in the center position, the switch at the
moment, so it's off, to the right is going to turn the 70RPM, to the left is going to
turn the 2RPM, and you won't be able to see it, but the other switch on the right here
is turning on and off the USB, so all we've got to do now is seal it all up and just jam
all those wires in there, make sure they're not touching anything, I'm actually going
to cover them up in a bit of electrical tape so they won't contact anything that they shouldn't
be contacting, now as you can see, so we've got the 2RPM going there, you can hear that
it's on full power here, we've returned down the pulse width modulator, while you won't
be able to see the fact that it's slowing, you should be able to hear that it's no longer
turning quickly anymore, in fact, by the time we've got to this point, which isn't even
nearly off switch, we're operating at about 15% speed, it's much more obvious when you
hear the 70RPM, so we've got all our wires done, we've crammed them all in there, we've
made sure that there's no exposed parts so that they're not going to be making contact
with any metal, and from this point, it's really just a matter of sealing it all up,
so this is the drill chuck, we're about to use it to mount it onto the drive shaft of
the motors, and this is what spins, and for those that haven't used a drill chuck before,
basically you just put in your little key here, and you turn it, you don't actually even
have to turn it, you can spin it, and as you can see, it opens and closes the little vice
grips there, which will seal around the shaft, and lock it on, now once it's locked onto
the shaft, of course the shaft will turn it, and much in the same way as a fishing rod
works, it will actually take in the line, and pull the camera towards the motor, of course
if you've got it on angle, it works in reverse, and you can actually let the camera slide
out, which is a lot less intensive on the motor, but not that they matter, these two
RPM motors are extremely tough, extremely tough, okay now what we're going to do is
just actually attach the chuck, so I'm just opening it up to make sure it will fit on
the shaft, and once it's on you can just actually turn it to fix it most of the way, and then
once it's nearly on you can tighten it by putting your key in here, so it's extremely
tight now, we've now got our chuck on, which spools our thread, basically what we do is
we feed it through the guide, so that it makes sure that, so to do that I've literally just
drilled holes in that little bit of steel, but if you do it using my method where I suggest
you mount it underneath, you won't have to worry about the guide, if you do do it the
exact same way that I've done it, and you choose to have a guide, you do just have to
be careful that it doesn't, if you're using metal as the guide, you've got to have some
plastic around it, I just use a tiny bit of thin tube, something along the lines of this,
so what I do, just to stop it from fraying the fishing line, or whatever it is you choose
to use, so doing that will stop it from wearing on the metal and fraying the fishing line,
and when we flick the switch, you'll see that it is pulling the line, you'll see here that
by turning the pulse width modulator, we can adjust the speed at which it's pulling the
line to something which is almost imperceptible, now it looks like it's not even moving there,
but I guarantee you it is, and that's the kind of speed that you'll require when you're
doing extremely slow time lapses, I'll just point out here the position of the bracket,
so I've just drilled holes and put two bolts in the side, and then just bolted on using
just some bolts that I had lying around the house, this L bracket, the holes down here
are what mounts into the standard tripod screw slot at the end of your slider, and I'm using
this, which came from some old gadget that I had lying around, but I've suggested rather
than getting this L bit of steel from your hardware store, I've suggested getting L brackets
a pair of them for a flash, which is actually cheaper, and we'll come with one of these,
and so you won't have to worry about having something to screw into your tripod 3 eighths
inch screw hole, on the side you'll see the mounting points for the bracket, you'll
also see that I've just drilled a hole to have the shaft popping out, it doesn't have
to be particularly neat, as long as the shaft pops out and it doesn't catch on anything,
that's all that matters, on the back you'll see some screws from the mounting points from
where I've put on the brackets that hold down the motors, you'll also see just where I've
mounted on the guide plate, but as I suggested if you put it there you won't even need this.
On the top you can see the USB port, and flicking the switch turns it on, you probably won't
be able to see it, but there's actually a blue LED that's on there and that'll charge anything.
In this case I prefer to use it to power my fan, okay alrighty and we're all done now,
so thanks for taking the time to watch this video, I hope it's been helpful, I just wanted
to say thanks to all the people who have put forward the original ideas which I've taken
and hopefully put together into a slightly more digestible and easy to follow format,
so thank you to all those people who actually came up with the ideas and I've only slightly
incrementally improved upon them, I hope you enjoyed and as I said let me know if it was
useful or if you have any questions, thanks for your time.
