Deceptively simple design with excellent results.
For Turntable for Stepper Motor (Kit)
Before I found Denniss' design, I had cobbled together a stepper motor turntable for photogrammetry that sort of worked. As others have said in their reviews, and I found to be true, is that this design is easy and quick to assemble resulting a system which has a stable base with smooth operation. All the flat parts appear to be laser cut with smooth finishes, plastic film protection and the hardware is high quality too. While assembling the kit you can tell there has been a lot of brain power used to make all the parts work together as a system. Once I had assembled the system, I found that the table has almost zero rotation resistance, so my small stepper motor moved it easily. I showed it to my wife, and she said from the side it looked like an Antikythera mechanism and I agree.
I found two minor issues when I first used this system with my existing controller.
The first thing I noticed was there was a noise coming from somewhere. I found that the table bearings were rattling in their cage (not unusual for open cage bearings) when rotated quickly. So, I used my controller to adjust the stepper motor rotation to a slower speed which eliminated the noise. No bearing lubrication needed and very quiet.
The second thing I noticed was the turntable would shake/recoil at the end of the servo motor rotation step. This movement is due to a very small gap between the tabletop slot and the servo drive dog by design for ease of assembly. This movement may not be a problem with large objects but most of my subjects are insects, small seashells and other small items. So, for my needs I made a minor fix to eliminate the excess movement by applying masking tape along the edges of the tabletop drive dog slot and injecting hot glue into the slot. I only injected a very small amount at each end of the slot and used a tool to smooth the glue while it's hot to keep the top flat. Once the glue cooled, I ran the system again and found that the hot glue was acting as shock absorber for the tabletop and stopped the shake/recoil. I used hot glue because it's removable if I need to do maintenance at a later date.
For the price I think this is the best Turntable kit available.
Response from FluxGarage | Feb. 15, 2024
Thanks a lot, James! I absolutely appreciate your suggestions and will add a summary of your remarks to the product description, so that other users can benefit from it.
