A little setup for Hall tuning and calibration. Got full quadrature decoding for extra precision. It now has 3794 ticks per 360 degrees of the whole filter. 1/10 of a degree precision. More than enough for accurate CPL positioning.

First pass prototype complete. Got all the gears worked out as well as the PID control optimized specifically for quick 90 degree rotations as fast and as smooth as possible. It now takes Tilta CPL 1/4 of a second to switch with minimal noise. Shrink electronics down next...

Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to get something right. This was me getting the right gear prototype 3D printed. 24 tries on the left just to get printer settings right. Another 8 to get the slicer do the right things. So 32 tries just to get a single gear.

Still find it using regular 3D art tools like Blender much easier for initial design and proxy fitting. This will be re-modelled with proper CAD software to get all the STEP files for manufacturing. But I got the functional prototype working with off-the-shelf breakout parts.

Got some CAD parts of a custom Tilta CPL micro-motor worked out and 3D printed to test the fitting. It's almost injection molding friendly but some modification will be needed for sure. Especially the addition of draft angles.

Test fitting custom micro motor case for Tilta CPL

Damn Google with their new Android 16k page alignment requirement... Spent 3 days and a lot of chatgpt-ing to get all Qt and other native libraries reconfigured and recompiled. So of the configs and libs were 10-15 years. All worked great though - don't touch if it works!

Another rig complete. The guys are still going to put nice laser cut frame and covers around it. This also went through joint hardware/software optimization process in here nearly every shot make a difference and used for reconstruction.

I think I found the case where Chinese factory is not a viable solution. Wanted to get these custom Polyacetal gears manufactured but anything reasonable that is injection molding based starts at 1000 QTY and not good for small batches. But my first CNC tests look promising.

It seems that ChatGPT does have a sense of humor...

Now I feel like a chemist 😆

At least GPT-5 (the others are very similar) admitted it. Got into quite a conversation with it after telling that if it was a junior or any programmer for that matter at any company it would have been fired if not on the spot but during the closes performance review...

This was one hell of a year. Not everything went according to plan but a lot of great things happened where not expected. Expanded on the hardware components and parts but also made a lot of improvements on the software side that I am eager to release early next year.