Panoramic Head

A simple 3D-printed adapter for capturing panoramas with Canon Ixus 135.
The objective of having a panorama mount is to align the rot/pan axes with the center of the lense/lense system in order to eliminate parallax when aiming the camera. Ie. no matter how you move the camera, things should not move behind each other.

To find out where this point is along the axis of the objective, just draw some rays (lines that meet at a single point) on a paper, and then move your camera so that the lines all become vertical.

In this design, the vertical alignment is taken care of by the hinge with the wing nut, and horizontal alignment can be adjusted to match the tripod's placement of the mounting screw.

I designed the part in FreeCad. The logic of its operation is a bit exotic at start, but it yielded without massive effort into a usable tool for this simple task.

Not that these old-timey dimensioned drawings are any use to anyone, but they are satisfying to draw...

I printed the part with Ultimaker 2+, courtesy of Sello library workshop. Black PLA, 180 µm layers, about 1½ hours per part. Surprisingly 20% infill was more than enough to make the parts very rigid.

The other used parts were a mount screw and a nut from eBay (about $1 a piece), a M2 bolt, washer and a wing nut.

FreeCad and .stl files here. The FreeCad model is parametric, so it is possible to customize the part for another camera.