Waveshare 360° Omnidirectional High-Torque 2-Axis Expandable Pan-Tilt Camera Module, Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4B / 5, Driven by Serial Bus Servos, Based On General Driver Board for Robots

Well, I don’t understand why people complain about this kit so much, understand you are not buying a plug and play toy, this in custom hardware kit and you still need to work on it to get going, sure it wasn’t easy, but it worked for me. The main and the most annoying problem was assigning id’s to servos I tried minimum 50 times before it worked 😁 The documentation is far from the best and overall platform is not there yet, if you are not a coder or super advanced gemini and claude user at least, don’t try 😆 This will bring you at least two weeks of mental pain.

The camera works exactly as listed. It is much cheaper than building out a module individually. It's important for people to understand this isn't a toy, though. It does require technical aptitude and a separate raspberry pi/jetson nano which to operate. That said, setup is easy using Waveshare's wiki guides. Great product as usual from Waveshare.

I purchased it for a project and was able to go through the complete installation, but it is not compatible with the new pi 4 os or pi 5 os, I tried both, but the put-together video is only partial, skips necessary steps, and the end, you are left with a non working cool looking POS, Support by email said that they are updating something and i will be notified when it will be fixed. I'll keep trying; I will update you as soon as I can make this work.

All the parts were not in the packaging, so it was useless. ADD Okay, I decided to take a chance and order this again. This time, it did come with all the parts and several extra parts as well. I have it assembled but I attached it to my UGV Beast. I had to calibrate the center position of the servos (required), but other than that, I'm fairly satisfied with the product this time.

Instructions are okay, I bought it to upgrade my 4wd platform I bought earlier. Tried e-mailing customer service and their help was a quick not to read the documentation Still working on it, if I ever get it figured out I think it will be neat for using as an inspection robot.

I got this for an "off book" project beyond just being a straight-forward camera. My goal was to create a "haunted portrait" for Halloween - basicall a picture frame where the eyes and head follow you around. This waveshare module ended-up being a pretty good backbone for the project. What I like: - The pan and tilt servos are way stronger than I expected - no jitter, no lag, and surprising quiet when moving slowly. It really helps sell the illusion of subtle head movements instead of clunky robot movement. - I was able to mount a small pico projector where the camera is meant to go. The torque handled the weight perfect fine. The included picatinny rail made mounting much easier than I had anticipated. - I ran it off a Raspberry Pi 4 and tapped into face-tracking libraries. With a little tweaking, I was able to get the module to respond without too much effort. - The web app was basic, but the fact that I could customize it meant I wasn't locked into one use case - perfect for my strange off-book project. What could be better: - The stock camera is pretty basic and limited. If you plan to use this for anything more than a surveillance camera, you'll probably want to swap in your own payload. - Documentation was clear enough for a robotics hobbyist, but if you're new to Raspberry Pi or servo control, expect quite a lot of trial and error - It's not silent under faster motion, so if you really require stealth, you may need to work around that. Overall, if you're looking for a plug-n-play webcam, this is overkill. But if you're into robotics, RPi, or tinkering with Pi modules in unexpected ways, this think is pretty cool. I'm still working on my haunted portrait and have a bit of tinkering still to do, but the customizability of this module is what makes it really shine. Out of the box, it is pretty basic - but if your willing to invest some time in it, you can really find some neat uses for it.

The motor did not work well and it is hard to figure out how it work

This is for tinkerers and DIY people who look to more than just the manufacturer for answers. Single board computers and microcontrollers let you choose what pattern of signals to send out on the pins, so it's up to you to set it up correctly to work with something like this. From that perspective, this is well made and works great. It's not for someone who wants instructions like what you get from LEGOs or something. I wouldn't personally recommend this for someone who is just getting into microcontrollers and single board computers unless they have someone more experienced to guide them or they are passionate about learning.

Needs to be built up. Lots of parts, no link to instructions, but easy enough to find. Some real small parts that make it a bit of a challenge for these old eyes. For North America, the small metric sizes meant made it a challenge, although being in Canada, not as much as those in the US. Not finished yet, but working towards it.