Intervalometer Prototype 1

A very rough prototype of my infrared intervalometer I made to control firing of my Nikon D50 camera at timed intervals for the purpose of time-lapse photography. I based it off of a Arduino Duemilanove microprocessor.

It has an LCD to view what it's doing, such as what mode it's in, how many pictures it's fired, and how many seconds left until it fires off the next. Pots control the LCD contrast and brightness, and a third controls the delay between shots.

There are 3 modes: Set, Interval and Timer. Set is the only mode that allows you to change the delay. Interval is the main mode, and fires off the IR LED at intervals based on the delay you selected. Timer mode fires the IR LED once to open the shutter, waits for the delay, then fires it one more time to close the shutter. That's mainly useful for taking exposures longer than 30 seconds, as my D50 has a max timer of 30 seconds.

This is the rough prototype I put together to make sure everything was set up right, and allowed me to do all of the programming. My next step is to solder all of my components together on a PCB and package it all in a plastic box so that I can throw it in my backpack when I go shooting. Once I have that all done, I'll shoot another video of the end product. This prototype up to this point is about 8 hours of work.

Here's an example of a time-lapse experiment I did recently, but using a laptop to fire the camera at intervals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thhSTuHohOA

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• intervalometer
• time-lapse
• photography
• nikon
• infrared
• timer
• delay