Hi Fivetide,
I like the sound of your robot plans. Very interested to see how you get on with item c), although slightly nervous about the take over the world part.
Sorry we're out of stock on Pan/Tilt kits. New shippment from Dagu should hopefully land on Friday.
With regards to shaking from the mini driver. Unless this is quite extreme, I don't think that this will be fixed by changing the mini driver, I think that it's just standard for the kit at the moment. With the kits I've assembled, I've noticed that it can be a bit noisy at certain positions, but I haven't found that it shakes the camera image excessively. I would say that shaking with the pan/tilt kit we use maybe isn't as bad as the video you posted, but it is similar.
Going forward, I do want to improve this situation, but I believe that the solution is a software fix rather than a hardware fix. If you have access to an ossiloscope you should see that the PWM signal produced by the mini driver jitters a bit. This I believe is possibly due to a bug, either in the
mini driver firmware, or in the Arduino servo library. I think that we found earlier that moving the servo to different pins produced less jitter? Therefore one fix you could try is to change the pins used for the servos in mini_driver_firmware.ino (PAN_SERVO_PIN and TILT_SERVO_PIN). If you also change the value of VERSION_MINOR or VERSION_MAJOR then your changes will be automatically uploaded to the mini driver when the robot web server next starts up.
Regards
Alan