Overall this is a fun package to set up and use. The instructions are detailed and clear. It includes 2 sg90 mini servos and they are the common ones used in various products. Unfortunately, they are not the quality of the other components and in my case, they slowly wandered rather than holding their position. I order new ones and all is much better (still slow and imprecise compared to an RC airplane etc.).

Not a Sparkfun issue but it would be nice if the browser interface included a "center" button/command.

Sparkfun was understanding and responsive.

While none of the components of this kit are astounding by themselves, together they make a nice Pan/Tilt Security or Time lapse camera system. The Pi Zero is a bit underpowered to do much image analysis, but it is excellent for controlling the servos and Pi Camera. The one thing I liked most about this kit is actually free! The RPi_Cam_Web_Interface is a great tool for controlling the Pi Cam and both streaming and recording video and photos.

This is a good product, but the pan/tilt assembly is what I would call "rickity". To be useful at all, you will need to mount the pan/tilt to something solid, otherwise the whole assembly jumps or falls over.

The Guide that goes along with this is useful, and I was able to follow it with some "gotchas" along the way, but that's pretty normal for electronic projects.

Put together was easy. I noticed some differences in the Pi Zero setup. Mostly in the network part. Why all the work as far a using a serial terminal? Why not use the hdmi port. The os set up the wifi, why do I need to create files? I still have not able to connect to the Pi Zero web page.

From the 40's to the 90's Heathkit company produced electronic products for assembly. Just imagine building your own colour television set from a kit. It is hard to imagine that it was even possible to provide clear instructions over the scale of such a project. They did and did it very well I might add.

The camera kit assembly instructions fell far below that standard. To start, the picture of the bill of materials didn't match what came in the delivered kit. And what is with the red lines in the pic? Oh, you discover at the end you will never use those parts. I do confess at one point the instructions indicate there are a few extra parts. Phew, not just a few.

I'm not accustom to writing reviews. To placate myself after a such a frustrating ordeal, I planned on writing a diatribe on my experience. Then I decided to provide simple words to describe the experience.

Fragmented, fractured, in-congruent, inaccurate, short sighted, falls short, misleading, incomplete, wrong audience, disappointing, frustrating and disheartening. Ah yes, perseverance, I did get is completed in the end.

"You may need to assemble and disassemble these two parts a couple of times to find the right rotational position of the servo motor so that the tilting portion has its full range of motion." Really folks, that is the best you can do? I have 35 years in electronics. I had to draw on all the skills from the full 35years to finish the assembly. I pity the poor soul who is a hobbyist.

This was my first Sparkfun purchase. I had high expectations, considering the extensive materials made available and quality information I have found on the site. Oh buy the way. After the build I wound up with two flat ribbon cables. On long and one very short. They don't have connectors matching anything on the pi, camera or servo driver board. They didn't appear in the picture either. Should I return them? I assuming they may be from another kit or did I miss something in the instructions?

There are two important problems that I had with this product:

1. The pan servo has a annoying buzz when idle. I think this might be an issue of the code given that it has no problem when I tested with an Arduino.
2. The mount does not appropriately hold the pan servo, when I "sandwiched" the pieces it has a gap of about 3mm, sufficiently for the thing to wobbly itself at each move.

The step-by-step guide to assemble went great, thanks for a very thorough document!

The code suggested for this needs some SparkFun love. Powered off, the pan servo rotates more than 180 degrees and the tilt servo rotates almost 180 degrees. Powered up with the suggested software I get maybe 90-100 degrees of pan movement and at best 90 degrees of tilt movement. Unfortunately there's code in JavaScript, PHP, and Python all controlling the camera, so it's very difficult to tell which code to tweak. The JS code sends a pan/tilt value to PHP which writes it to a FIFO that Python reads. It'd be nice if SparkFun perhaps forked the suggested code and helped us tweak it to get full range of motion.

BTW, putting some screws in the package to secure the bottom of the pan/tilt assembly would be nice. The servos move fast enough that the whole assembly will fall off-balance if you just sit it on a table.