cheap X-Y pan automation

So I have always wanted to control my camera on a tripod from my laptop inside but every time I see a robotic panning device for a camera it is way to expensive but tonight I accidentally stumbled upon this guy on ebay. http://www.ebay.com …D3%26sd%3D12100​2153415%26 At the bottom there seems to be a few links to other similar products which is really cool because these are actually affordable and will do the job. The cable appears to be a 5-pin Din midi cable so I imagine I could extend it pretty easily and get a 12 foot usb cable to control zoom on my camera through EOS utility. If anyone else has ever been curious about this sort of thing, this is probably the way to go. I'm going to use it to take pictures of birds in the backyard within the warmth of my home, hopefully without scaring them off now.

One thing I'd want to be careful about is that it's rated at 6 lb.; unfortunately many of us have learned the hard way that tripod and head ratings, especially for the less-expensive offerings, are, shall we say, optimistic. On manual heads, you'll just get a lack of stability under heavier loads. With a motorized head, if you overload it you may burn out the motors over time (and it may still be unstable).

Hmm thats good to consider thanks Jon. The motor tthey use is capable of producing 37lbs of torque from what I have read and I have been asking alot of youtube users about their experiences. It seems that there is a next step up that approaches the prices of gigapan and meade automated pan tilt mounts which has metal gears instead of nylon belt drives but the price makes it more of a serious purchase than a not so bad experiment.