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Step 21Using the Controller
I won't insult your intelligence by explaining the manual shoot option!
Shoot = Ok/Shoot
Mode = Change Mode/Back
So if you're in a submenu like setting a delay, you can press mode to return to trigger condition setting.
One thing i forgot to mention! If you are in interval shooting, the screen will go blank after 5 seconds of inactivity. Holding any button except shoot will display the shooting status. If you hold down shoot for a second or two and release, the interval shoot will be cancelled.
Time lapses look cool, but they're tricky beasts to master. When thinking about time lapses, you should consider how fast the scene is going to change. If you're taking pictures of stars panning across the sky, you probably want around 10 second intervals (with 4 second shutter, mid-high ISO, large aperture, etc). If you're taking pictures of plants growing, perhaps every 5-10 minutes would be better. Some excellent time lapse films can be made by constructing a stroboscope (flashing lights) to "slow down" some fast moving, periodic action. The result is often amazing because you can take pictures of water droplets falling and splashing in slow motion, clock mechanisms firing, that kind of thing.
Whilst i added the option of up to 9 hours interval timing, Nikon cameras have an annoying feature of turning off the remote function after a maximum of 15 minutes of use. In practical terms this means you can't take time lapses (at least on a D90) with intervals of more than around 14m50s (to play safe). On the plus side, with camera memory sizes being huge these days (i get 500 RAWs on an 8GB card), you can afford to take more pictures than you need. More pictures will simply give you a smoother picture anyway! If you need reallly long intervals, you can probably do it by hand or you could wire the controller to the camera (just change the shoot function to suit your needs).
Now, having power management options would be really handy here. It would certainly be a boon to be able to dial down your current consumption when the device is idle - and you should definitely consider changing the source code to do it. I plan to release an instructable some time later with updated code/hardware.
With the trigger, it's up to you. I'll give you one application - the laser trigger.
Mount a laser in a clamp, or duck tape it to something so that it points on your LDR - which is plugged into the controller. You should see a value (~800-1024) that is fairly static.
Point your camera at a bowl of water below the beam. Measure the distance from the surface of the water to the beam (a ruler is fine for this). Everything (in theory) falls at the same rate, depending on surface area and so on. Using basic mechanics you can work out how long a delay to dial in depending on the height that the thing you're dropping will fall through.
s = sqrt(2a*s_init)t + 1/2 at^2 will do you nicely. s is the distance, u is the initial velocity, a is acceleration and t is time. s_init is the height that the object falls before it hits the laser (determines the "initial" velocity as it hits the laser).
In any case, solve this equation for t and you should have a pretty accurate idea as to when your object will hit the water.
This is overcomplicating, you could do it by trial and error if you wanted, and you should definitely play with the numbers so you get different images each time. The only thing you need to do is make very sure that you drop your object from the same height each time.
When the object breaks the laser beam, the adc will trigger, the delay will wait until the object has just impacted the surface of the water and your camera *should* take a picture of it.
Shoot = Ok/Shoot
Mode = Change Mode/Back
So if you're in a submenu like setting a delay, you can press mode to return to trigger condition setting.
One thing i forgot to mention! If you are in interval shooting, the screen will go blank after 5 seconds of inactivity. Holding any button except shoot will display the shooting status. If you hold down shoot for a second or two and release, the interval shoot will be cancelled.
Time lapses look cool, but they're tricky beasts to master. When thinking about time lapses, you should consider how fast the scene is going to change. If you're taking pictures of stars panning across the sky, you probably want around 10 second intervals (with 4 second shutter, mid-high ISO, large aperture, etc). If you're taking pictures of plants growing, perhaps every 5-10 minutes would be better. Some excellent time lapse films can be made by constructing a stroboscope (flashing lights) to "slow down" some fast moving, periodic action. The result is often amazing because you can take pictures of water droplets falling and splashing in slow motion, clock mechanisms firing, that kind of thing.
Whilst i added the option of up to 9 hours interval timing, Nikon cameras have an annoying feature of turning off the remote function after a maximum of 15 minutes of use. In practical terms this means you can't take time lapses (at least on a D90) with intervals of more than around 14m50s (to play safe). On the plus side, with camera memory sizes being huge these days (i get 500 RAWs on an 8GB card), you can afford to take more pictures than you need. More pictures will simply give you a smoother picture anyway! If you need reallly long intervals, you can probably do it by hand or you could wire the controller to the camera (just change the shoot function to suit your needs).
Now, having power management options would be really handy here. It would certainly be a boon to be able to dial down your current consumption when the device is idle - and you should definitely consider changing the source code to do it. I plan to release an instructable some time later with updated code/hardware.
With the trigger, it's up to you. I'll give you one application - the laser trigger.
Mount a laser in a clamp, or duck tape it to something so that it points on your LDR - which is plugged into the controller. You should see a value (~800-1024) that is fairly static.
Point your camera at a bowl of water below the beam. Measure the distance from the surface of the water to the beam (a ruler is fine for this). Everything (in theory) falls at the same rate, depending on surface area and so on. Using basic mechanics you can work out how long a delay to dial in depending on the height that the thing you're dropping will fall through.
s = sqrt(2a*s_init)t + 1/2 at^2 will do you nicely. s is the distance, u is the initial velocity, a is acceleration and t is time. s_init is the height that the object falls before it hits the laser (determines the "initial" velocity as it hits the laser).
In any case, solve this equation for t and you should have a pretty accurate idea as to when your object will hit the water.
This is overcomplicating, you could do it by trial and error if you wanted, and you should definitely play with the numbers so you get different images each time. The only thing you need to do is make very sure that you drop your object from the same height each time.
When the object breaks the laser beam, the adc will trigger, the delay will wait until the object has just impacted the surface of the water and your camera *should* take a picture of it.
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too bad I probably couldn't build something like this :( :)