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Connecting the twins
To connect the cameras top to bottom is a tough job. With the A5 twin I built, I tried making a U shaped bracket connected to their tripod sockets. For several reasons, this didn't work very well:
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For the A100 twin, I took a different path and decided to glue both cameras directly to a fixed spacer bar. I tried several different adhesives to do the job before I settled on 3M Marine Adhesive 5200. Among Juneau boaters, it is said that 5200 is the stuff to use if you never want it to come apart. I tried both 5200 and 4200 on a test jig and confirmed that 5200 was the stronger of the two. While 4200 would probably have done the trick, in the end, I used 5200. Time will tell if I regret the choice.
Alignment
When working with the A5s, I determined that the CCDs of the two cameras may be misaligned even when the cases are perfectly aligned. With this in mind, I tried to design an alignment procedure for the A100s to prevent it from being a problem. I stood the left camera on a smooth horizontal surface and applied some 5200 to its top edge. I stuck the spacer bar to the left camera and applied some 5200 to the bottom edge of the right camera and pressed it against the spacer bar. I then turned both cameras on and used their LCDs to align the tops of their image area on the same object by rotating one camera or the other. When both cameras seemed to be seeing exactly the same things, I clamped them and left them to cure.
After the glue had cured, I took some test shots. The shots revealed that I hadn't succeeded in getting the two camera's correctly aligned. With hindsight, I can see what I should have done:
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This procedure would be much more work than what I did for this rig, but the resulting alignment should end up being much better. For this camera, I will have to tweak each pair as I "mount" them. Since I used 3M 5200, the alignment will never change, so it should be an easy operation to batch in software.
How does it work?
Great! It fits in my belt packs. It is much less intrusive than my A5 rig and weighs less. Camera firmware has improved tremendously in the last four years and the A100s are much easier to use than the A5s. The separation is too small for dramatic landscapes, but this shortcoming is of my own making. I still carry a slide bar for such occasions.