Peter Hoare

Hi Thor, When you say a replacement motor, do you mean the inner drive motor? Do you know whats wrong with it? A lot of these motors fail because the potentiometer wears out, it could be that? I have only ever seen one M One that has an actual failed drive motor. If the drive motor inside has broken, thats a pretty terminal problem for the motor. If its the potentiometer, I can replace it. Alternatively, if you bought a second hand M-One with potentiometer problems, I can replace that pot for you and bring it back up to as new working condition. I have fixed many M-Ones over the years, I seem to be the go to guy for M-One problems now...!! Pete.

Yeah, I dislocated my knee when I was about 14 and its never been right since. I slipped over and it twisted out again when I was swimming at the Vdara in vegas after NAB, and now its just totally screwed Never a second goes by when my knee does not feel weird (it feels wrong as I type this). Im not an operator, but ive learnt, with knees in general, once they are seriously damaged, they are never the same again. Last thing you want is to totally screw your knee, you have a chance to avoid that now as Chris says...

Presumably this is going to crop in on your original image quite a bit isnt it, you would have to take your wobbly unstabilised shot really wide knowing that the stabiliser was going to crop in on just the middle of the frame.... Clever though

Hello Mih, How much current does this draw? How stiff a lens can it turn? How big is the gear that meshes with the lens?

The M-One has a very strong and well built gearbox, the only thing that ever seems to go wroing is the poentiometer, but the digital one dosn't have one of those. If there is a dodgy encoder, then if its the same manufacturer motor/encoder that we all use, then the encoder is part of the motor and cannot be removed or replaced. I could possibly order in another motor and encoder, but it wouldnt be quick or cheap, and the M One has a triangular spline coupling type thing, and so we would have to cut that shape onto the new motor shaft, which would not be too easy. All in all, I think a digital M One would be a pretty tough one to fix without acess to original parts. I can have a go though. Pete.

I took one apart years ago, probably about 7-8 years ago now, and I can't really remember a lot about it, other than at the time, I couldn't replace it. Quite a neat design really, might be able to do it now though. Pete.

We are making this roller for the Axis1 that will fit to a gimbal and you can roll the wheel with your finger to control the focus (or any other lens axis). There are buttons on there for run/stop of the camera (Arri RS/F55/Red/Lanc) as well as some other functions like limiting. We are just finishing it off now, it will be available in the next few months. Pete.

I don't know a lot about this exact story, but I can attest to Chris's manufacturing issues. As an equipment manufacturer in a similar arena to this, it is very easy for your entire best-made plan to just get wiped out in one swoop. I have been lucky, but there have been several times where there were distinct possibilities of huge problems that could have landed me in trouble like this, but I escaped. Developing something like this is not easy. Im not saying what has happened should be forgiven, but this is a difficult and very gutsy project to undertake, and these sorts of projects are delicate and can be wrecked with one minor thing. I feel sorry for Chris really. I can't speak for how customers were treated, but I do sympathise with his situation. Pete.

This kind of behaviour in digital systems (we call them runaways) is usually either encoder damage or some kind of wiring failure. If the encoder is broken, this will happen. If there is a wiring problem and the power to the encoder is faulty, or one of the signal lines is broken, the same will happen. We have an error handling system in the axis1 that detects a runaway and stops the motor turning to prevent lens damage. If there is an encoder or wiring failure, there is not much that can be done besides physically finding the problem and fixing it, but at least it prevents the motor speeding off and damaging any lenses. Pete.

I have to say, I did think it was chinese too. I saw it at BIRTV in China in August and it was there with a chinese company, and the sales reps with it at the time seemed to be the developers/manufacturers of the system. Pete.

The M-One is a strong and very substantially built motor. The torque of any system is not just the motor, the amount of current the motor driver can dish out is also an important part of torque, something to consider when thinking about motor torques.

I couldn't wait to see this follow focus at IBC, but sadly was told it would be at Cinec as it wasn't ready. A week later, I was at cinec and from what I could tell, the BT follow focus was not there. A shame, as I really wanted to see it, caus its one sexy mother of a follow focus, but there you go. Hope its all sorted out now, it looks excellent. Guess il see it at NAB. Pete.

We do a 19 to 15mm dogbone, but not a 15 to 15....

Yes, Dbus and PPM are the radio controlled hobby industry control systems. You would be able to buy any cheap RC plane controller and plug it in and do pan/tilt. PLC Electronics also makes a hand wheels box that plugs into a standard RC transmitter (which talks to the Dbus or PPM receiver) so you can control the ronin with hand wheels which is pretty neat. http://shop.plcelectronicsolutions.com/categories/VERACITY-CONTROL-WHEELS/?sort=pricedesc Pete.

I didn't see it anywhere. I don't think Ikan had anyone at the show this year. Maybe at cinec? Im good freinds with the ikan guys, they are usually at IBC, it was a shame to miss them this year.

Actually, the Red Rock is 1mw output. At least, the one we took apart was. I would think with a higher power radio chip, it would burn those AAs out in a matter of hours....

When I asked them about this at NAB, I was told it would work with only their motors. Even though they use a standard looking 7pin Lemo (a fake lemo) it is not the standard digital motor protocol, or Preston Standard as everyoen calls it. Its their own internal brushless motor system, rather like the Cmotion Compact or the original Viewfactor motor, with its own internal drive electronics. They just chose to use a 7pin lemo. It looks like it should work with Heden motors, but it dosn't. They could have changed this since of course, but given the work involved in making the system that way, it would seem unlikely to me that they would change to a standard preston style motor control at this stage.

The basic rule is, if it has a Lemo 1B 7 pin on the motor, it will probably work. This rule must be ignored in the case of the Tilta motors, as they have copied the industry standard connector, but have their own pinouts and control systems so the motors won't work with normal digital controls, although they do look like they should.

If you do get them back, we reproduced the most prone to fail component so more than likely, I can fix it for you. Pete.

We keep meaning too but we cant make enough to keep up with complete axis1 kits, so have not had any spare motors to sell as singles. We are working on it though. If I do build this motor bench mark tester, do you think other manufacturers would be willing to let us test them for benchmarking?

It should also be noted that quoting torque figures is not always that helpful. Torque all comes from current, and some systems provide more current than others, so a motor may not be as powerful on some systems as it can be on others. There are also various ways to measure the torque, either by taking the manufacturers torque output and multiplying it by the gear ratio, or you can actually measure it somehow, but there are various methods. I have here a laboratory force gauge, and I keep meaning to make a device to test torque levels of motors at a set current and then we could benchmark them all. For this reason, I never quote a torque level for our motors, I just tell people they are strong. Pete.

In the video showing the auto focus tracking on the Andra box, it shows that tracking transponder as about the size of a smart phone. They then show (what I presume is supposed to be a demo of the auto focus?) tracking focus on a chess piece and the end of a gun, both of which are far too small for the smart phone sized transponder.... Also no photos of the motor or the sensor on the camera, which personally, im very interested in seeing.

Hi Alan, Would be good to see you, would be happy to let you do a RFF stand off.... Pete.

Alan, we bought some of the Paralinx stand for ourselves, so I will see you there too! Pete.

Also try IGUS. They do a lot of plastic bearings, made out of a slippery self lubricating plastic. They have a pretty big catalogue of stock washers, one of them is bound to fit.... Like this: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/bearing-units-accessories/6671516/