I got a nice note from G-Wizard Customer Wiley Davis, who has a Kickstarter project underway to create a product for the photography market. Wiley tells me he used G-Wizard extensively to calculate feeds and speeds while developing his project.
We ran an earlier article about a product called "Modigrip" that was another Kickstarter project. If you've never looked into Kickstarter, it's a very cool concept. Essentially, you pitch your business idea, and the Kickstarter audience can decide to jump in and fund it. When I first looked at Wiley's Kickstarter page this morning, nobody had decided to fund. I'm looking at it at the end of the day and he has $15,000 pledged of the $20,000 in capital he's trying to raise. If you have a business idea, maybe Kickstarter could help you get it off the ground too!
Wiley calls his gizmo the "$50 Follow Focus." It's a good looking piece of kit:
Follow Focus drives the lenses focus grip with a toothed belt (kinda like a servo drives a CNC axis)...
Another view...
The parts that go into the Follow Focus...
Not being a commercial photographer, I will let Wiley describe the value:
All we wanted was an affordable way to adjust the focus on our DSLRs in a precise, repeatable manner. We wanted a device that performed solidly and intuitively and we didn't want to spend a lot of money on it since we'd rather spend our hard-earned dollars on more lenses or food and beer for the underpaid crews on our low-budget shoots. But such a follow focus didn't exist, until we made one, that is.
They intend to use the money they're raising to upgrade from their little hobby mill to something of a more production-oriented natures. Looks like they're well on the way!
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