Patron question regarding photogrammetry rig

Hi,

Sometimes I get rather interesting questions in PM's to which the answers really deserve to be public so from now on I'll try to be more transparent with those. Anyone feel free to join and continue the conversation if you want in the comments section below. 

 
Starting out with someone who asked:

I am very interested in how you designed and built your photogrammetry rig along with what sources you used to gain the knowledge as I am in the middle of building one for my work. If you could point me to the content you have created that might answer some of these topics that would be great.

To which my answer was:

I haven't actually done much content about that. I have 5 video series here on patreon on photogrammetry processing in general, but not specifically how that rig was built.   

However I'm happy to try to point you in the right direction and help with anything I can. Sadly the answers I can give from the top of my hand like this is not very helpful.  

The rig was built with aluminum profiles from "RatRig" but could be built with profiles from anywhere, really. They are pretty much all the same. Not sure if you can order from RatRig, depending on where you live, but you can certainly check their website out for inspiration and order similar stuff elsewhere if necessary.   

As for the Arduino coding which I had no previous knowledge of from before, it's all just youtube and long nights of grinding. I had the benefit of a father who knows a bit or two about arduino coding who could help me out, but mostly it was just very long nights with trial and error until I finally got things working. I've never faced so much problem solving in any project before and it really required me to start thinking in a "logical way" that I have never learned before, but once you start to get the hang of the logics of arduino programming, it's actually not that difficult. The limitations are mostly our own imagination and ability to come up with logical solutions.

As for the design process, I did it all in 3Ds Max first to figure out what measurements etc I needed for the profiles, but in the end there was a lot that had to be changed along the way. The design is not great in any way and if I had the energy I'd really want to do it all from scratch, rifining it a lot.