Finally found a use for my Pi

[vagabondvisions]

Hi all, I have owned a Pi since the first pre-orders started shipping back in 2012 or so. Initially, I used it as an XMBC server but was disappointed with the overall performance. I eventually swapped it out for a full size home theater PC and the Pi has been sitting unused ever since. I just couldn't think of something to dedicate it to until now. That's where I hope this forum can come in, with a nudge in the right direction.

I want to build out a camera rail/dolley system for my dSLR and camcorder. This is essentially a track on which the camera rides smoothly from one side to the other in order to produce video panning shots, motion time lapse, or large scale panoramas. The system functions just fine if I am manually guiding the car along the track. I would like to rig up a precision pulley/winch system which I could program for the specific need. For example, in a motion time lapse, I would want the winch to pull the car an inch every 30 seconds ("inch" being calibrated to number of turns on the motor or drive). In a video shot, I might want the car to slide along at a steady pace of a foot every 3 seconds, and so on. The Pi seems a natural fit for this application due to size, weight, and ability to run on battery power in the case of remote shooting.

I'm assuming the Pi portion of this is the easiest. It would involve (I imagine) connecting to the headers on the board and running some kind of customized script on the Pi to interact with the motor or pulley system. Where I am stuck is how to get started with the peripheral hardware. There isn't much weight involved and I am not expecting to pull the car up steep inclines or sheer vertical spaces.

A hobby motor attached to a geared system which drives the wire spool?
Could the Pi handle two winches, on either end of the track, so I can program back and forth movements?
Can the Pi deliver power to the motor(s) via the header pins or would that require a separate power feed?
Recommended scripts or apps to accomplish the software control of this? Something I could access or control from my phone via bluetooth/wifi?

To really push the limits, what about dual purposing the Pi in some modular form so that it can either drive my winch(es) or control a pan/tilt tripod head?

Any help is appreciate. For reference, though I am a photographer and filmmaker, my background is in IT and am equally comfortable on a command line or with a soldering iron in hand.

[B.Goode]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspilapse/

[vagabondvisions]

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspilapse/

This is pretty awesome. I am already scouring my house for spare materials and making a shopping list. In researching the above link and more which followed, I want to maybe up the ante a bit. If I use the Pi to make the dolly track, then I would have spare IO leads with which I could possible also add a tilt/pan function to the camera mount. Is this correct?

Has anyone done any work with not just pan/tilt but also real-time stabilization? I'm thinking, possibly, the kind of brushless motors used in hard drive spindles (and I have a metric crapload of those on hand), but I'm unsure if they could adequately stabilize or move something like a dSLR. Also, there is the question of whether the Pi could control them directly or would it require use of a separate controller card.

[DirkS]

If I use the Pi to make the dolly track, then I would have spare IO leads with which I could possible also add a tilt/pan function to the camera mount. Is this correct?

Yes.