Pi Zero with steerable pi camera

I wondered how minimal I could go for a pi based camera, both in terms of size, power and to a lesser extent cost. I have been using webcams, but I soon found that even on a pi 3, 2 USB webcams wouldn't run reliably at more than very basic resolution under motion.

I decided to see how far I could go with a Pi Zero and a pi camera. Of course this means I can only put 1 camera on the Pi, but I gain flexibility in that the cameras are no longer USB cable length limited.

The result is very successful:

I also decided to I to try making the camera steerable using this little adafruit gadget.

Here is the final BOM:

1. Raspberry Pi Zero with basic case and kit of leads
2. Raspberry Pi Camera (mk 2)
3. Raspberry Pi 2 Camera cable
4. Adafruit mini pan tilt kit
5. a few bits of wire
6. 220uF & 100nF capacitors
7. High power usb wart
8. oh yes and a wifi or lan dongle

Total cost about £60 if you have to buy it all.

You will also need a usb hub for initial setup at least (I run mine with just the wifi dongle, so I don't need a hub)

The parts of this I was concerned about were:

1. Were the servos and the pan tilt kit going to be stable / accurate enough?
2. Would a single core processor cause glitching or other problems?
3. Could I drive the servos from the Pi's 5v supply? (they draw about 250mA running, 600mA stalled and 10mA idling.)
4.  Was there a reasonable way to route the ribbon cable?

 And the answers (so far):

1. just about
2. No, all looking good (using pigpio to drive the motors)
3. Yes, adding the capacitors improved stability (of the motors - the Pi was fine)
4. meh - ribbon cables are always a pain with 2 axis movement.

One arising questions:

1. is it safe to run the 5v servo supply from pin 2?

Well on the Zero there is no fuse between the usb power socket and pins 2/4 so assuming your servos are well behaved, then yes. On other recent models the polyfuse has been uprated to 2A, so those should be fine as well.