Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Multifunction Cable Release for DSLR


I've been working on a multifunction cable release for my Canon DSLR for a while. Today I managed put together a prototype on an independent board. Here is a photo of the prototype. So far things are working as expected. At this point, the following functions are supported - Trigger, Bulb mode, Delay Mode and Variable time mode (Intervalometer). I'm planning to add few more functions soon.

Multifunction cable release for DSLRTechnical details
The system uses the ATmega328 8bit AVR micro controller. The programming was done using an Arduino Duemilanove. Squeezing the menus in the 16x2 LCD display unit and navigating the whole thing using only 5 buttons was fun.

Currently the system runs from a 9v battery and draws about 50 (including LCD back light). At this point no power saving measures are implemented. Once power saving functionality is in place, I might be able to run this using 2 CR2032 or CR2025 cells. I should be able to reduce the size of the whole thing when I design a proper PCB for this.

With minor code changes and adding an IR LED, I was able to trigger a Nikon from close range.

2 comments:

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) License

Creative Commons License
The images and photographs posted in this blog by Prime Jyothi are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.