Pan/Tilt control from Arduino Shield?

I currently have a Blackmagic SDI Arduino Shield hooked up to an Arduino Uno and my Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K. It's successfully controlling resolution/frame rate, sensor gain, white balance, shutter speed, aperture, focus, and zoom.

I'd love it if I could also send commands for pan and tilt, which could be relayed to RS422 pins on the camera's expansion port.

Do any of you know if this is currently possible? Or if this is a feature that may be coming soon?

Unknown, there has been no indication of how this feature is implemented, or if it has even been enabled. If you can work this one out, you can sell the controller setup!

You would also need a compatible pan/tilt head to mount under the camera, which is what the RS 422 connector for, to connect the camera to the Pan/Tilt head. The commands are sent down the SDI return, as are the other control commands, but no indication of what the commands are? Perhaps BM is working on their own pan/tilt head for the Micro camera, that will use this connector.

I have also been waiting for this to get sorted.
Cheers

There has not been any news so far of the 422 output of the Micro studio camera..

We also are waiting for the official protocol.. We do have some test setup running with an Shield as sender and Ancilarry de-embedder as receiver..

Thank you both for the quick replies!

Denny, I've been experimenting with using the Bescor MP-101 for pan/tilt, which has more than enough power to move the micro studio camera. I even have an Arduino sketch that reads from a cheap Pelco-D controller and sends lens control commands over SDI to the Micro Studio Camera and pan/tilt commands over the Bescor 7-pin MIDI-like cable. (https://github.com/esonderegger/PelcoBl ... kmagic.ino)

The downside to this approach is that it requires running an extra cable to every camera in a multi-camera setup.

Daniel, how are you running the Arduino shield as a de-embedder/receiver? My understanding was that the shield could only do embedding/transmitting.

Personally, I'd be even more excited about an Arduino shield that could extract the Blackmagic camera control messages and control a camera like the Canon ME-200S. Because that would enable just running two SDI cables to every camera and controlling everything from the ATEM Switcher software.

Do either of you have ATEM switchers? I'd be happy to do some investigative work decoding the RS422 commands coming out of the Micro Studio Camera. I just don't know how to get pan/tilt commands into the camera in the first place. Does the ATEM control software have any way of doing that?

Thanks!

Evan,

The 422 port of the micro is not working yet!! It is still "dead" because there is no protocol to control it..

De-embedding is not done with the shield.. I have a special de-embedder build with a lot of software to decode the BMD protocol. A development that is an ongoing project for almost a year now..

Can't tell you a lot more at the moment as it will be released as a commercial product soon..

P.S. I checked the Canon camera.. Yes i can control it if they kept the protocol the same as the smaller cams..
BUT.. What i don't understand is why they put i pretty expensive 35mm dual pixel technology 4K sensor in it.. But have no way other then 1080P output...... With a non 4K sensor it would be 1K cheaper at least... Still at retail price of 5500 dollar you could buy 5 Micro studio cameras..... Which do 4K output at 30P..

Thanks Evan, I had been looking at the Bescor head, B&H has it on sale. How much noise does it make when paning or tilting? I have used larger robotic heads that were controlled using Cat 5 cable, and they were very quiet when used on set.

And no, the ATEM can only control some Sony pan/tilt systems, using a very expensive hardware controller connected to the ATEM, and has no control commands at this time sent to the RS422 on the camera. As Daniel (Xtreemtec) pointed out, BM has not implemented any of this yet. Perhaps that will be the surprise at NAB 2017
Cheers

I've been struggling to change the framerate and resolution, and this is the only post i've seen referencing that. Could you post the lines you used to change those settings? I've gotten gain, exposure, and white balance to work, but resolution and framerate are eluding me.

Edit: Got it to work
int8_t video_mode[5] = {30, 0, 6, 0, 0};
ctrl->writeCommandInt8(1, 1, 0, 0, video_mode);

" I had been looking at the Bescor head, B&H has it on sale. How much noise does it make when paning or tilting?"

The Bescor heads are very quiet, no stepper whine. I use them to shoot orchestra concerts and have never had an issue. You MIGHT hear a tiny bit on a built-in camera mic, but otherwise, not an issue.