We’ve covered a lot of ways to mount a camera overhead over the last few years, but this is probably the fanciest and most elegant. Because it’s not just to give you an overhead cam. Oh no, this Micro Jib by Lewin Day at Mechanistic is a full-on mini crane that lives on your desk and will let you mount the camera at whatever position you want. There are no commercial options available for small desktop-sized mini cranes, so Lewin designed and built his own. It was inspired by Ivan Miranda’s giant 3D printed camera crane (which is very different to Alex Chappel’s similarly massive 3D printed camera crane), but is small enough to sit on your desk without getting in the way.
The gimbal has a maximum weight limit of 2kg for the camera setup and there’s a counterweight on the opposite end that’s adjustable to let you balance things out perfectly as you adapt your rig – perhaps swapping out lenses or even switching cameras completely. Once balanced, it stays exactly where you put it.
It’s a very cool design, although unfortunately, this is not an open-source product. It’s not that expensive coming in at $39 for the plans that you can purchase on MyMiniFactory. There’s also a complete assembly instructions including a bill of materials listing all the bearings, nuts, bolts and non-printed bits you’ll need. Between the assembly instructions and the build video above, you can see how it all goes together. So, if you’ve got a bit of experience with Fusion 360 then you could potentially have a go at designing one of your own that’s inspired by some of the principles of this one, if you felt so inclined. But Lewin’s already done pretty much all of the design work for you. Plus, at $39 + parts, it’s going to be cheaper than any commercial solution out there – even if there was one available. [via Hackaday]
