My Adafruit Trinket arrived today and I've been able to get the gimbal working. The first run did a half turn in the yaw direction (full room coverage) in about 16 minutes according to my video camera (and this can definitely be sped up still).

Video starts at 1x video speed, then jumps up to fast foward mode. I think we can all agree that a 20 second video is watchable and an 8 minute video is totally not. This video shows a quarter turn (half scan) run.

There are a few things that still need to be optimized on the gimbal that will be coming up in future updates.

1) Speed has not yet been optimized and I kept re-compiling the code until eventually I said, "Good enough for now, I want to see if this can run as a system."

2) There are a lot of oscillations when moving the yaw motor. For today I did two things to limit the oscillations: I made the motor run at quarter-step, and I put a friction pad between the tripod and the base plate to dampen the movement. I need to work on decreasing these oscillations a lot more. I'm using a bearing washer between the two components but am wondering whether a regular washer would be better. Also, this is a prototype and the mass is probably unevenly distributed.

3) The electronics are still patched together. This needs to be moved on from the breadboard stage.

4) Still working on sourcing the sensor. I got a notice again today that the LidarLiteV3 is still not ready. And the SF-30B is $449 which will take some time to save up for unless I pursue a grant.