I spent the first part of this afternoon in the workshop blindly trying to build a mount to hold the pan servo on my tripod; obviously I failed spectacularly. I was measuring the thing there and then and attempting to cut pieces of MDF to fit. To try and save myself more grief I thought I best think about it a little more and draw a scale drawing with measurements.

I started in Illustrator and created a very simple drawing with basic, basic measurements. It was only after an hour of this did I realise that this drawing was pretty useless as I wasn’t sure whether my hidden lines, etc were all there/correct. Below is my handywork.

It’s been years (5 to be precise) since I last touched CAD drawing at school. Back then I used Vectorworks. I really aint to sure about what the program to use these days is (Google SketchUp?). So I asked Graeme, an Architect friend of mine for advice. He is now just doing it for me from the rough scale drawing I showed him (see below for some nice, ‘proper’ renderings). Excellent.

The annoying thing is this is just for prototyping, to hold everything on the tripod while I continue to develop it. I’ll have to build another mount later which will take into account the Arduino, circuitry and cables - covering everything. I’m visiting Graeme in Manchester this weekend so I’m going to make him teach me how to use SketchUp.

It’s all very well to design it on screen however, I still need to actually make the object. Going by my past attempts to build things I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this won’t be easy. Maybe I can find someone to do it for me.