Here recently I’ve been playing with making time lapse videos of the MPCNC while cutting things up. I bought an app for my arduino called Time-Lapse Pro (I even paid for the pro version). The only problem I have with it, is by using my phone, I can’t use my phone for other things.
I have an older Canon DSLR hanging around that’s not really doing anything, so I thought I’d do some electronics work this morning.
I taped an Arduino Beetle (Leonardo chip on a postage-stamp sized board) onto the back of a 2 channel relay and hooked a small cable up to the remote trigger port on the camera. Some quick coding later and I have a 1 second trigger for the camera. Even with the camera set to small it takes a photo larger than 1080P.
I plan on doing some cutting tomorrow night and will try it out then.
The code is stupid simple. I didn’t even bother trying to hook up an on/off switch to it. You plug the arduino in and it immediately starts triggering the relay. Hook it up to the camera and flip the on/off switch on the camera. It will keep taking pictures until the battery on the camera runs dry.
//Stupid simple camera trigger.
//Hookup the output pin to a RELAY
//Hookup the COLLECTOR and NO on the RELAY to the trigger/ground on the camera
#define tPause 250 //how long to hold trigger
#define tTrigger 1000 //how many milliseconds between triggers 1000=1sec
#define tOutput A0 //Set to output pin going to relay
void setup() {
pinMode(tOutput, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(tOutput,LOW);
}
void loop() {
delay(tTrigger);
Serial.println(“waiting”);
digitalWrite(tOutput,HIGH);
delay(tPause);
digitalWrite(tOutput,LOW);
}
This little setup will probably get expanded in the near future. I’ve always wanted to build an arduino based lightning trigger. I also want some type of way of selecting the delay time between images.
One small thing I’ve noticed in the little testing I’ve done is that it gets noisy. Every second a relay clicks followed by the mirror in the camera slapping up and down. I’m sure it won’t be heard over the CNC/dust collector, though.