Dazzler is ready for its close-up

As part of getting the Gameduino Dazzler promo video ready, the board itself needs to be shown.

For a lot of still photos I use a serious photography person down the road in Santa Cruz. But for this kind of thing I do it myself. It's fun.

Here's the lighting setup. The actual light is provided by two cheap contractor's work-lights, which are really bright. There's a sheet clipped over the left-hand one to soften the light. With old incandescent 500W worklights this would have instantly caught fire and burned down my garage. But because they are 55W LED lights they're completely fine.

The tent is this tiny collapsible one. It's good for small subjects.

Close-up photography under diffuse light really shows up dust and dirt. It's surprisingly hard to keep dust off the board. Now I just use air spray. A quick spritz before every shot works wonders.

Inside the tent a vice holds a stepper motor. The white plastic rod is stuck to the PCB with thin double sided tape. The whole assembly has to be quite rigid to avoid any shake or slip as it moves.


After all this set up a Python for loop takes 400 images, stepping the motor by 0.8 degrees each time.

The loop triggers the camera over USB using ptpcam. I use an imported (and hence heavily discounted) Nikon D750 DSLR and a 55mm Nikkor lens. This (somewhat famous) lens has the incredibly useful attribute of being able to focus very close-up indeed. For small objects it's very wonderful.

With the camera's exposure locked the resulting 400 still images look like this:


After cropping and curve adjustment to flatten the background:


That's it. With 400 still images you can assemble them into a loop to spin the product any way you like. (I did the same thing for the I2CMini video.) The finished Dazzler loop will be in the promo video, scheduled to launch in a couple of weeks now.


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