Simple. Clean. Green. We love riding our bikes. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could video/photo document our trips and commutes? But taking pictures and riding the bike at the same time don’t go too well together. So we thought of building a camera mount for our bikes with a motorized pan.

One of the major problems with building a camera mount for bikes is stability. We initially planned to include an active/passive damping mechanism in our design. But a few prototypes later we realized that most of the vibrations were high frequency and were very difficult to filter out. So we stuck with the basic idea of having a rigid mount. The whole design was created using a combination of NX, Autocad and CorelDraw. The main structure for the mount was fabricated out of ABS on a 3D printer. The other parts were laser cut out of acrylic.

We ended up designing and building two versions of the mount suiting two different styles of bikes and riding styles. I wanted to go for a simpler and smaller approach for my road bike while my project partner, Saurabh, wanted a more aggressive approach for his mountain bike which also included a built in flash light.

Version 1:

Version2:

A hacked RC servo motor is used to turn the camera which gives it a complete 360 degrees of freedom. The direction of rotation is controlled by a DPDT switch mounted near the handle bar grip. The system is powered by 2 AA cells.