MeteorStack

Motorized stacking rail project for micro and macrophotograhy, controlled by a Raspberry Pi.

Hardware

Components

• Raspberry Pi
• DM556 motor controller or an equivalent
• Nema 17 stepper motor or an equivalent
• 24 Volt power supply for the motor controller
• Power jack female connector
• 4x 1k Ohm resistors can depend of the transistor you use
• 4x BC547B NPN transistors most NPN transitor can fit the bill
• 1x 100 Ohm resistor can depend of the optocoupler you use
• 1x KB 814 DIP-4 optocoupler
• 2.5mm jack cable to trigger the camera
• 2.5mm jack female connector

Schematic

Dont forget to configure your motor controller with the right current for your stepper motor

Software

Usage

In /software

• Configuration in config.txt

[STEPPER_MOTOR]
motor_enable_pin = 17 # GPIO pins
motor_direction_pin = 27
motor_step_pin = 22
motor_delay = 3E-004
# Number of pulses needed to do one revolution, can be changed with the motor controller
pulses_per_rev = 400

[CAMERA]
# GPIO pin
camera_trigger_pin = 23
camera_trigger_delay = 0.2 # the time needed for the camera to detect that it had been triggered. Keep it as low as possible
camera_vibration_delay = 1 # delay for the all rail setup to stabilize before taking a picture
camera_taking_picture_delay = 0.2 # delay to let the camera take the picture before moving again during stacking

[STACKING]
number_of_shot = 10 # Number of pictures taken during a stack
number_of_step = 2 # Number of steps done for each picture taken

• Execute meteor_stack

Developement

In /code

Prerequies

• Blessed for the user interface: https://github.com/jquast/blessed
• Cython for the compilation

Compilation

Just execute compile.sh