controlling stepper motor's in a surveillance camera

[lolimpol]

i got myself a 360 degree turnable non ip surveillance camera, now after the teardown, i wanted to drive the stepper motor's inside with the built in driver, because: less cables and arduino's... less mess now i have attached some pictures hoping that one of you smart people can help me with this... thanks. greetings from the Netherlands: Pol

pictures:
(http://imgur.com/a/iqfi4)

[Ian.M]

So its got a PIC16F76 and a RS485 interface.   You've got two choices here - figure out the communications protocol and command it via the RS485 interface, or replace^* the PIC16F76 and write your own firmware to handle the steppers.  The PIC can be replaced by something like an Arduino without physically removing it as tying its /MCLR pin low will disable it and tristate all its I/O lines so you can safely patch into them.   

* Although theoretically you could simply reflash the PIC16F76, there's no way back from that as the odds are better than 99% that a commercial product is protected against dumping a copy of its firmware.

[electr_peter]

Such PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) systems are often controlled with Pelco-D or Pelco-P protocol via RS485. I would suggest to implement such protocol before rebuilding motor control from scratch. You can get Pelco-D/P controllers (keyboards/joysticks) as well.

[Muttley Snickers]

As electr_peter mentioned, most PTZ cameras and housings will incorporate various telemetry protocols such as Pelco P/D, Samsung, Panasonic and numerous others, you will probably find more information and manuals on this unit if you can locate a specific model number or label somewhere on the main board or housing, you may also need to default the unit or configure it via the dip switches as the currently set telemetry protocol and address could be anything and there should also be an on screen menu for setting the location presets, tour groups, speeds, etc. (edited picture below and only a guess).

A handy device for testing and configuring these is a PTZ camera tester which again incorporates a number of protocols such as the one pictured below. I couldn’t see the camera module itself in the pictures and it would probably have been a unit with an integrated zoom lens which obviously would have been compatible with the main housing and board.