ReleaseOctober 27, 2026

v0.5 release notes

Orbiter v0.5 is the v3 mechanics, the first release that is a whole machine: a telescoping arm, a swing arm with a phone and a line laser at its end, an electronics box, the cross rail at 90°, and a FreeCAD assembly with working joints. Alpha.

Orbiter v3 — the azimuth drive with its platform on the left, the elevation drive on the right, and the orbit arm raised with the gliding tube, the swing arm and the phone head at its end — Orbiter v3. The arm grew a telescope, an elbow and a phone.

What's in v0.5

v0.5 is a mechanics release: the third generation of the Orbiter hardware, v3, in the repo under cad/v3/. It is the first release that is a whole machine rather than parts of one: frame, both drives, an arm that carries a phone and a line laser, and a box for the control board. The drives and the frame are the v2 ones; what is new is everything around them.

Highlights

A telescoping arm. A 20 × 20 mm aluminium tube slides inside the 25 × 25 orbit arm like a piston in a cylinder: a printed piston cap with an expanding wedge at its inner end, and a seal in the orbit arm's mouth that also clamps the tube with an M5 lock screw under a knob. About 200 mm of travel.
A swing arm. A 160 mm tube on two printed hinges at the end of the gliding tube, with M5 × 45 bolts and hand knobs. In the model the two hinges are linked one to one, so swinging the arm moves the phone parallel to itself — sideways, without turning it away from the object.
The camera head. A phone clamp with a yaw hinge and a tilt pivot, the phone as the camera, and a 12 × 30 mm line laser on a ball mount on the clamp's profile.
An electronics box. A printed box for the Factory F0.7 control board on the outer side of the main rail: standoffs, cable notches that the lid closes, cut-outs for both USB-C ports, vents over the drivers, held on by two U-shaped clamps around the rail with M5 screws into heat-set inserts. The model carries the cables too — both motors, both encoders, the power input and the laser — as schematic routes.
A T-shaped base. The cross rail now meets the main rail at 90°; the tie cap's channel follows a parameter in the model.
A FreeCAD assembly with joints. cad/v3/freecad/Orbiter_assembly.FCStd opens in the Assembly workbench of FreeCAD 1.0: the frame is grounded, the two drive axes and the three hinges are revolute joints, the gliding tube is a slider. Drag the arm and the machine moves like the real one.
Everything else as before, regenerated: 47 printed parts as STL and STEP (61 pieces, about 1.17 kg of PLA), the bought parts as STL, the GLB, photoreal renders, and — new — a print direction for every printed part, picked by slicing the candidates.

The electronics box on the outer side of the main rail, with the motor, sensor and power cables leaving through its notches

The camera head: the phone in its clamp on the yaw and tilt hinges, and the line laser on its ball mount

The orbit arm raised, with the gliding tube out of it and the swing arm at its end

The cross rail under the end of the main rail at 90 degrees, held by the tie cap

Orbiter v3 from the electronics box side

Status: alpha

This is a more or less battle-ready release, and alpha testing starts with it. We will keep improving it, and the software and the electronics will catch up:

The control board is a draft. The Factory F0.7 board in the box has not been built or tested. Its model shows the size, the connectors and where the cables go; do not order it from these files.
The software is unchanged since v0.4. The server and the 3D viewer still model the v2 arm with the camera on the tube; following the v3 arm and the phone head is the next step.
The wiring is schematic: routes, not lengths or connectors.

Grab it

Tag v0.5; the files and what is in them are in cad/v3/README.md.

RawMechatronicsOrg/Orbiter

Two-axis Wi-Fi pan-tilt camera rig — CAD + ESP32 firmware + FastAPI server + Vite/R3F UI + native CV workbench + Docker stack + optional COLMAP container. Lab kit, v0.5 (alpha).

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