It started out as a way to save time, but quickly turned into one of our most used photography tools. A Precision Automatic Turntable that lets you produce high-resolution stop-motion movies of objects rotating, like this one:

Backstory

It’s annoying when you are photographing an object, and you enter a cycle of:

Going from the camera to the object,
Rotating the object a bit,
Return to the camera, checking through the lens again
Deciding that it’s not quite right
GOTO 1

What you need is a Remote-Control Turntable for the object. A remote-control turntable makes it possible to look through the lens and rotate the subject at the same time, saving wear-and-tear on your precious precious knees.

Something like this:

With lofty dreams of owning such a device, and a tendency to choose ‘DIY’ over ‘buy’, we looked at what we had lying around, fired up openSCAD and set about making a turntable.

Solution

Turntable 2 (there was a version 1 that didn’t quite make the cut) is:

Powered entirely by USB C (a 20 volt PD trigger will supply plenty of juice to the motor),
Driven by a stepper motor for greater precision (a Nema 17, the kind 3d printers use: up to 6,400 increments in a single revolution)
Simplify the original design by using 2 gears instead of 3 (no more worm gear: Simpler == Better)
Controlled via a webpage (remote controls are great, but are easy to lose, so we’ll use a Raspberry Pi Pico W and control the device using a webpage).

The Remote-Control (Web page)

The controls are a simple webpage styled with some CSS and hosted on the Pico using phewap. It means that we can control the turntable via smartphone etc. The buttons use the same visual trick that we used on the YouTube plate to give the impression of engraved controls.

Building one yourself

If you prefer things explained in a video:

We’ve put everything you need to make your own Turntable, from the code to the 3d printable gears on GitHub.

Why Bother?

By sharing the way we built our turntable, including the code to build one, we might give people a good start on making devices that are similar. Three things that sprung to mind while we were thinking of other applications were: