I’m writing to present my new Raspberry PI powered project, a simple motor controlled directly from the Raspberry’s GPIO. I’m very excited to think about the raspberry actually moving things.
My initial idea was building a webcam which could rotate to follow a face or an object, but i believe the Raspberry PI’s CPU is too limited for this purpose. Anyway i decided to try to make a webcam turning system which still is pretty cool.
To do that I disassembled an old cd player, and used the laser moving motor system and some other recovered pieces to make it turn the webcam.
The following video (in italian) shows how it worked (not really well but hey, it does turn the webcam!).
The interesting thing in this project is that this kind of motors (from an old cd player) are capable of turning a webcam (which had been reduced in weight as much as i could) being powered only by the GPIO port. Not the 3V or 5V pins, which provide pretty much current, but the very GPIO pins of the board.
At this stage it is of course completely unusable, but like almost every project i’ve made so far, it just wants to be a proof of concept.