[Konvas] off-topic -- motorized heads

[Sean McVeigh]

I'm building a motorized pan head for a friend for xmas... was wondering 
if anyone has any experience with such equipment.  I'm using a stepper 
motor coupled through a worm gear to drive the plate... does anyone see 
any problem with a 0.025 degree/step (90as/step) final resolution on the 
output plate?  He mainly wants to use it for very slow pans and 
timelapse type work, so I think it'll probably be fine.
I'm probably needlessly concerned, as I've maybe been paying too much 
attention to astrophotography-related websites while trying to spec it 
out, where the requirements are more like single-digit arc-seconds per step.

Anyone want to recommend some features for such a head?  Since it's 
going to have a microcontroller brain, I can probably do things like 
re-play moves for green-screen matching.  Going to make it programmable 
off-line so that you could draw curves for it to follow.. heck could 
probably even take a dump from a tracker so you could match-move new 
shots for compositing.

I guess next, he'll want a tilt head so he can stick the two together 
and plug a joystick into it :)  oh.. there's another feature!!  DB-15 
connector :)

Cheers,
Sean