A few words why I have chosen the Olimex AVR-MT-128 board. This board has all the major features I was looking for in a rather compact package:

• LCD (unfortunately without backlight)
• Five keys for navigation
• A LED (which turned out to be wired parallel to the relais, so it’s rather not so useful, as the relais triggers whenever the LED is toggled)
• 16-bit PWMs for servo control (8-bit is not enough for smooth servo movement)
• Buzzer for notification when a job is done
• Plenty of IOs for additional stuff (rotary encoder, AF and shutter control, additional LEDs etc.)
• 4Kb of RAM (should be more than enough)
• 4Kb of EEPROM (nice to persistently store some settings)
• 128Kb Flash (more than enough)

Well, that’s about it. A rather nice board in my opinion. I plan to package it in a nice little enclosure and add a battery. So this could be used standalone without the mechanical construction. Might be useful when I just do timelapses etc. instead of always carring around the panorama construction.

I develop the software as an open-source project, partly because I use open-source components but also because I like the open-source paradigm. The source code repository is hosted on my github account here. I have ported QuantumLeaps QP-nano framework, which is a really nice small event-based operating system for small microcontrollers. I also use avr-libc which offers superb utilities for the AVR microcontroller line.  I have already implement a simple keyboard driver and the basics for a menu system. Based on avr-libc I also written a LCD driver. This all works really well so far.

The system, called CamControl for now (fancy name eh?), will have the following features:

• Automatically capture full and partial panoramic pictures
• Capture timelapse pictures
• Capture HDR picture series
• Capture long shutter pictures

After some research, I have decided to buy the following components to build my camera control system:

• 2x SPG785 Pan from ServoCity, one with 3:1 and one with 5:1 ratio gears (213 $)
• Olimex AVR-MT-128 board (45 Euro)
• Olimex AVR-ISB500 programmer (30 Euro)

This are the most important components which will let me develop the software. For the mechanical construction I will have to buy some more stuff, but this can wait until my servos arrive (they are backordered). The Olimex stuff already arrived and I have already started development of the software. More on this later.