Hello, axiiio fans!
This week we thought we'd share some pictures of our early prototypes with you. The axiiio nano system has been in development for over six years, and in that time we've made lots of different versions of the system, tested them, broken them, revised the designs, and started again. Here are just a few examples of the things that we've tried.
This is an early 3D printed prototype of the system. In the background, you can see the original axiiio receiver. We managed to shrink this down to about half the size and weight of that first prototype without compromising any of the flexibility or power! You can also see our original hardware controller. This was before we had decided to make the nano system app-controllable. We are developing a hybrid controller for serious professional use and will be talking about that in a later post.
Here you can see that old receiver prototype mounted on a camera rig. We always intended to use high-quality metal latching connectors for the entire system. You can see this even on the early iterations of the receiver.
One of the most important things about motion control on locations is ease of use. The axiiio nano system was tested repeatedly on real sets doing real work to iron out the kinks. You can see an early version of the system in use on a set in this image. Check out the double pancake stack underneath the tilt pan head. The top pancake is controlling the pan axis while the bottom one is being used as the drive for the slider. The latest versions of our nano slider have the pancake hanging off the back of the slider plate to reduce the center of gravity of the tilt pan head. This is very important for stability.
We've been through many stages of mass production development in this project to try and get the cost down to an affordable level. In this image, you can see some of the machined parts we made to test some of these manufacturing concepts.
Here's another example of one of our in-house machined, functional prototypes which were used to test manufacturing concepts. This is showing an early machined capstan version of the motion pancake and axiiio nano motor.
One of the engineering goals of the whole project was to make the axiiio nano system extremely lightweight and rigid. Here you can see the weight of the prototype's pan-tilt head. 1650g (3.6 pounds) is extremely light for a head as capable as this one.
We hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane! Next week we will be announcing indicative pricing for all of the kits that will be on offer as well as for the accessories/add-ons that you can get during the campaign.
Thanks
That's all for this one. Stay creative and make sure to get in touch if you have any questions, want more details, want to discuss your motion projects, or anything – just email equiries@axiiio.com.