In order to automate my 360° photobooth, I concocted a gear train with a 36:1 reduction ratio. I had to google gearing 101 because I was totally ignorant on the matter, but I had a working principle pretty fast. I designed the gears through a website called geargenerator.com. I previously worked with 10° increments, and thought it would be easiest to stick with it, so basically I chose the 36:1 ratio so that a full 360 of my stepper motor (easy to program) would result in said 10° rotation. I didn’t HAVE to go through that much trouble, but I like round numbers. Sue me 🙂

Simply put, the theory is this: I have an 8-tooth gear driving a 24-tooth one, which will slow down rotation 3 times. Then another 8-tooth wheel drives the 96-tooth one under the lazy susan. (just recently learned that this is the word for it in English…) So that constitutes a 12x reduction. Put the two gear assemblies together as depicted in the header image, and you get a 36:1 reduction.

Since my lazy susan (yay!) isn’t 100% round, I devised an elegant way to get the gear attached as concentric as possible in relation to the axis of rotation. With a sharpie held in place, I rotated the disk above it and that gave me decent enough circles to guide me. It doesn’t have to be spot-on, as long as the gears interlock.

Cutting out the gear patterns was fast and easy.

Gluing it to the board.

That is as far as I got today. More to follow…