Static and Dynamic Camera Setup
Fifth Installment in my Project series
In this post, we will discuss about how we can attach our Pi camera to a motorized system to follow someone’s movement within the camera frame.
The main objective of this post is to make a dynamic surveillance system with one camera instead of a multi-camera system.
For this setup I am using these Pan-tilt-bracket and these servo-motors. This is how my setup looks like, though it’s a bit flimsy but it does the work for a basic setup.
Basics of Servo Motor —
According to SG90’s datasheet, it works on a PWM signal of 20ms cycle and 50Hz frequency. As the sheet mentioned, there are 3 main reference position—
0 (middle), with 1.5ms pulse
+90, 2ms pulse
and -90, 1ms pulse
So for all 3 position the duty cycle respectively are—
1.5/21*100 = 7.14%
2/21*100 = 9.52%
1/21*100 = 4.76%
Duty cycle = (T_on / T_on + T_off) *100
So a range of 4.7–9.5% dc
Generating PWM using RPi GPIO —
# import library
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO# Initializing
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)# Setup and channel
servo = 12
GPIO.setup(servo, GPIO.OUT)# initializing the channel as PWM output with 50Hz freq.
p = GPIO.PWM(servo, 50)
p.start(0)# setting up duty cycle
duty = (ms/21)*100 # ms is pulse T_ON, time for when it's high# Sending the PWM signal to the motor
GPIO.output(servo_y, True)
p.ChangeDutyCycle(duty)
time.sleep(0.2)
GPIO.output(servo_y, False)# Stop sending the PWM signal
p.ChangeDutyCycle(0)
p.stop()
Testing—
So test the positions/angles, I put the camera mount on my table at -90 degree initial position. Then I marked a vertical straight line. To mark a 90 degree line w.r.t. to the initial position, I used my sticky notes. Look at the following set of pictures to clearly understand my setup.
The last picture suggests the camera being rotated at 0 (middle) position.
To test the rotation of the servo, I fed in these 3 mentioned pulses (T_on values). For 0 degree middle position, 1.5ms is the value, but the servo rotation went beyond the marked line. So then I tested -90 degree initial position, that is 1ms. But the servo couldn’t go back to initial position.
So I fed in lesser values of T_on, 0.8ms, 0.5ms, and the servo rotated up-to 0.3ms. When I fed 0.2ms the motor did not move at all. So the -90 degree position was attained by 0.3ms pulse.
The previous 0 position pulse that I gave to motor, led to rotation beyond the marked line, hence I gave a smaller value and kept decreasing the value until the servo was at the marked 90 degree position w.r.t. the initial position. So for 0 degree position, pulse value was 1.25ms.
Similarly for +90 degree position, when I fed 2ms it did not rotated 180 degree w.r.t. the initial position. So I kept increasing pulse value and I found 2.6ms is for +90 degree position.
As seen from the picture above the servo rotated a bit beyond 180 degree rotation. 2.4ms was closer to +90 degree position.
So now the pulse range is 0.3ms-2.6ms, and accordingly duty cycle range is 1.42–12.38% as opposed to theoretically mentioned 4.7–9.5 range in datasheet.
Sometimes you have to go beyond the theoretical limits of a system to test it’s actual limits.
Implementation —
Now that we have understood the basics of a servo motor, we will try to use this system so that the camera can follow a moving object. More about this later.
Stay Tuned!
