Set up Cartesian Mimic¶
▶ Set up Cartesian Mimic — Watch the video
Presented by Fabrizio (MRMC). Source: talk.mrmoco.com, "Setting Up MRMC Mimic Handwheels for Cartesian Mimic on a Bolt Pan/Tilt," post #9.
Hello, in this video I'm going to show how to use the handwheels with a Bolt. This also applies with Amiga [rig] — it's a different input, but same mechanism.
So we have handwheels; each of these wheels is connected to an encoder that will give a signal to Flair. This is connected to the RT-14 in the Mimic port. So the first thing is to check that you can actually see the input in Flair. So you go into Setups → Test Mimic Input and you can see all the mimic inputs.
Zero them, and then if I move the left wheel, that's on Mimic 5. If I move the center wheel, this is on Mimic 6, and the right wheel is on Mimic 7. [Mimic] 8 is just Zoom.
Okay, once we know they are there, we can then use it to move the robot. You can do this in many ways. The first way I'm going to show is how to use it in the Cartesian [mode] to move pan and tilt in Cartesian.
So if I set the robot in Cartesian — for example, Roll Level, Locked World — I can move the robot in Cartesian, so I can move the robot camera in X, Y, and Z. I can pull — this is Y — then I can pan the camera, and I can tilt the camera. Okay, and I normally use the mouse, left and right click.
If I want to do pan and tilt with the handwheels, what I have to do is: go off Cartesian, just engage the robot. First thing, you go into Miscellaneous [Setup] and you have to turn off Cart Control Limits. This needs to be set to Off, otherwise the robot will lock up.
Then you go into Pan and Tilt Axis Setup. In the Control tab, you set Mimic to Encoder Velocity, Controller to Mimic 5 — which we know is the left wheel. Set the Scale to what you want — a little bit to 1; if you set it to 3, it will be just faster. Then on Tilt, same thing: Encoder Velocity, Mimic 6 — which is the center one — and leave the Scale to 1.
And that's it. So I can now re-engage the robot, go back into Locked World — I can still move the camera with the mouse on Cartesian axis — and then if I use the wheel: center wheel is going to tilt the camera, left wheel is panning the camera. You can see it's a little bit small — this is about the Scale, so it's slow. If you want it faster, you set the Scale to be faster. For tilt it's probably okay.
Okay, so this is just to use the handwheel in "panism" [live pan/tilt] mode. The next mode that I will show is how to actually record the mimic to adjust a move — so to use the handwheel while you are running a move, to adjust and add movement to pan and tilt.