OK, I've lost interest in my plant waterer for the moment. So I've been trying to think of other things I can do. I decided i'd like a small machine that lets me do stop-motion photography with my beloved Canon EOS 40D, and Arduino seemed like a good place to start. I could use the Canon SDK and write a windows app to do it, but sometimes it's nice to have a bit of hardware that you can bring with you.
First step then was to get hold of a cable release (being the easiest way to get hold of the right plug for the camera). Canon's own-brand remote switch, RS-80M3 is staggeringly expensive for what it is, but I located a 3rd party Jue Ying controller on ebay that did the job nicely for about a 10th of the cost, albeit without the elegant metal surround on the plug. As you can see from the photo, the internals are extremely basic - three metal contacts. White is ground, yellow is focus and red is shutter.
First step then was to get hold of a cable release (being the easiest way to get hold of the right plug for the camera). Canon's own-brand remote switch, RS-80M3 is staggeringly expensive for what it is, but I located a 3rd party Jue Ying controller on ebay that did the job nicely for about a 10th of the cost, albeit without the elegant metal surround on the plug. As you can see from the photo, the internals are extremely basic - three metal contacts. White is ground, yellow is focus and red is shutter.
To protect my camera from everything else, I used two opto-isolators to do the switching, and activating them is just a matter of setting some digital pins on the arduino high for a brief period.
Now all I need to do is wire up a pretty LCD display to let me set the shooting interval and my job is done. I've decided to use a rotary controller to adjust settings - coding that should be fun, hope it arrives soon.
Thanks for the write-up! I upgraded my remote accordingly. I can now remote-trigger my 40D from anywhere in the world :D
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