Hi All
I’m planning a remote controlled pan and tilt (PaT) unit that would be attched to the outside of a car via a suction cup that has standard camera mount holes. Mounted on that PaT would be a GoPro or other action camera. The goal is to be able to control the framing of the shot from inside the car while it is moving up to 80km/h; driven by a second person.
For the PaT I’m thinking
2 x FB5118M - Standard Servos (Feedback, 300 degrees, 17.5kg/cm). I want the wide angle range for the pan. 180degrees titl would be fine.
Rasperberry Pi Pico w
some kind of battery supply for power
For the RC I’m thinking of using a BT game controller.
Can someone please suggest a suitable power supply for breadboard prototyping and something for the battery supply as part of the working PaT?
Any other comments or suggestions would also be appreciated.
Sounds like an awesome little project, you would want to make sure the suction cup is rated for a fair bit of force, I can only imagine it would need it going about 80km/h.
For the battery powered parts, you would need to provide a fair amount of current to the servos in order to get them moving accurately. I think with the FB5118M Servos you would need above 4 amps to make sure there is no issues. Have you thought about using a small battery bank and powering them via USB-C. It may add a bit of bulk but would provide a pretty solid amount of power from the right battery bank which would likely be enough for this project?
Thanks for your input. The suction cups are built for this purpose but I also have an option to bolt the PaT to the roof rack.
The servos are possibly over specced, but I don’t know what the wind force will add up to and I want the 300degrees movement that these offer. I don’t mind if I need to use a larger battery bank.
Fair question, Kimmo;
The controller will be inside the car while the PaT is attached to the outside. Granted that the metal body of the car may present a problem. The distance is likely to be less than 2 meters. I think that should be okay. What do you think?
Google “mag base” and you will see they are quite common and used in all sorts of applications. The ones I mentioned previously are used sometimes by police etc for a temporary mount for their pretty lights or I have used them as a temporary whip antenna mount in the centre of a car roof, these are normally dedicated antenna mounts complete with threaded whip mounting and cable. If you are in western Sydney Hare and Forbes in Parramatta seem to have a good selection.
Bluetooth ???. That is usually not a very strong signal and usually for convenience uses little PCB type inefficient antennas so using it via a steel roof would be very much a “suck it and see” situation. I personally would not like to predict a result and if asked to do so would probably say pretty unlikely to be reliable. May be OK but you would have to run some tests and try it. Very hard to get any sort of signal strength indication other than it works or it don’t test.
Cheers Bob
The current you’ll need will depend on how fast you want to move the servo’s, with some smoothing on the input you wont see very large peaks compared to the stall current.
Liam
That would be challenging on the freeways. 
