Laser mounted on servo turret to point to interesting locations on a map
I have a large map (9ft x 6ft) in my home office. It's a triumph of cartography really. You can get it here for $100. Installation is the same as wall paper.
I had some servos (from R/C airplane hobby) and an extra raspberry pi and was inspired by an online tutorial (can't find link) in which the creator used hot glue to stick the servos and laser together... so now I have a thing which points a laser at my map.
Future goal is to have it read news stories from an API, figure out their location and point the laser at them. Like this weeks story about the ship stuck in the Suez canal.
sequenceDiagram
participant Browser as Web Browser
participant Hub as MQTT Hub <br> broker.hivemq.com
participant Turret as Laser Turret Device
Browser->>+Hub: Publish "target coordinates"
Hub->>+Turret: Forward "target coordinates"
Turret->>+Turret: Point laser to coordinates
flowchart
servo1 -- black(-) --> pico38[pico pin 38]
servo1 -- red(+) --> pico36[pico pin 36]
servo1 -- white --> pico22[pico pin 22]
servo2 -- black(-) --> pico38[pico pin 38]
servo2 -- red(+) --> pico36[pico pin 36]
servo2 -- white --> pico24[pico pin 24]
laser -- black(-) --> pico38[pico pin 38]
laser -- white --> pico16[pico pin 16]
| Part | Price | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry PI pico W | $10 | Amazon 2 pack |
| 2 Servo's (futaba S3107 for now... might update for more accuracy) | $1.87 | Amazon 10 pack |
| Laser | $1.05 | Amazon 5 pack |
| Hot glue | ||
| A base (block of wood for me) | ||
| Wiring (I have tons of wiring stuff from other projects) | ||
| A map | $100 | National Geographic NatGeo 9'x6' |
I tried to get this working with an ESP8266, but getting 5V to the servos was proving to be a PITA and the project was sitting next to a raspberry pi so I switched. Then another project had me buying pi pico's so I switched again.
Point to a well known point and allow user to adjust with keyboard
Detecting keyboard input is IMPOSSIBLE I think. pygame + pynput require a display to be connected
Honalulu Brisbane
Not 100% perfect, but here's the plan
- Manually locate a bunch of points using calibration setup
- To project a new point, find the 2 closest and extrapolate along a line between them
installint umqtt library
import mip
mip.install("umqtt.simple")
- Mount camera as well
- Facial Recognition
- Target people by name (spin the bottle type action)
- Recognize things in the room
- Target things
x and y range is 0 to 1000
servo x left = 970000 right = 470000
servo y top = 1370000 bottom = 1670000