Thursday, March 3, 2016

SMART SPHERE (working title)

This is the Beta version of the SMART SPHERE (working title), I have finished the shell and I am going to send it back to Jon Pandone to finishing the wiring, and then we should be ready to go ahead with field testing. What you see is a ball the size of a baseball with 5 triggers, 3 LED's and 2.5mm LANC plug, on the far side (not pictured) is a Hirose wired as a USB type A. Inside we have a brake out board for the triggers and LANC and a
Arduino Pro Mini board. We have programmed the LANC commands for Blackmagic Cameras, but with the Hirose USB you will be able to load all LANC commands for any LANC camera.
What we have now is Start/Stop under the thumb, autofocus to the right, then down the front, + value, - value and lastly under the ring finger, change mode. The mode trigger with toggle between, focus (blue), aperture (yellow), and zoom uses all three LED's. Slow zoom (green), medium zoom (green & yellow) and fast zoom (all three), and with the ability to program the SMART SPHERE any trigger can be assigned any task.

Lastly inspired by the stitches on a real baseball I notched the wood in front of the triggers so you can get a really good grip.