I have just received 2 Maxwell MP-101 Pan/Tilt Remote Camera Tripod Heads that I got on Ebay. Both work fine, but I need to find a way to slow down the pan and tilt from its already slowest speed; or more ideally, find a digital interface for these units that would allow scalable time. Anyone know of a such a thing? Thanks for the help....

Now all I need is a reliable camera!

I'm not familiar with the unit, but depending on how it is driven, it is pretty simple to build a timer with a 555 ic that would switch the drive power on and off at a variable rate. About $15 in parts.
You could even set it to toggle the camera shutter during the off part of the power cycle.
This is basically what I used before any of the commercial intervalometers became available.

ahh that's identical to the bescor. Think it's been tried but even if you pulse it the movement between shots is not consistent. If you can get it to work let us know!

Are they just standard DC motors? If so, you can just run your own PWM to them, and run them slower. Of course, you'll still have a lower limit higher than 1%, but the real lower limit would likely be much slower than whatever it's currently doing for you.

You can use a 555 IC to run the PWM - by switching a transistor, as Antz pointed out.

!c

Is it the same thing that Don French uses in his Automate?

http://www.thegadgetworks.com/

He seems to be a big, bearded, smiling fellow, so perhaps you could ask him directly for some advice.

To be a really good pointing device for timelapses it really needs to be designed for the task, or have some feedback (i.e. shaft encoder) and (microcontroller) brains added. Presumably that's what Mr French did.

Short of that perhaps you could replace the motors with suitable gearhead motors (they have built-in speed reduction.)

Surplus places like http://www.allelectronics.com and http://www.goldmine-elec.com may have something that would work. I'd do some calculations first, otherwise it might end up being too slow...