The observant reader may have already noticed that this project has been on the back burner for several years. That's a characteristic of mine I'm slowly getting to accept and embrace ;).

I can get super enthusiastic about ideas and then loose interest with the drop of a hat. Or one project turns into another because for the first project I need to make a tool, and then I'm completely consumed with making this tool.

Anyway. I'm back on this project, and the hackaday price hopefully gives me the imputus to come to a more finished version of this project.

Since the last log, I've come to some different insights on various fronts.

1) stepper motors are a really easy way of precisely driving gears and shafts etc.

2) My original idea of using three screws to hold up the mirror technically works, and I like the idea because it would look vaguely organic, but there's a more straightforward way of doing it which I'm going to pursue.

3) Because I'm hoping to make the project super simple so that by following my instructions, any vaguely technical person could reproduce this project. So I'll probably not use a microcontroller and battery power, but rather use a computer and a long cable. There are some more advantages to this approach, which I'll spell out along the way, such as plotting the data etc.

By making it super simple, it should also have a better chance to actually make the deadline :)

So watch this space.