Arduino PhotoLab


Droplet photography (link translated from French) often produces simple and beautiful images, but timing the exposure can be tricky. Snapping the photo too early or too late can cause you to miss the action, which only lasts a fraction of a second. EquinoxeFR (the people behind the Asus WL500GP audio hack) came up with a solution to this problem using a circuit with an ATmega168 running an Arduino environment. The circuit controls a syringe that contains a liquid and is triggered remotely to release a drop into a darkened chamber. A camera with the shutter open is attached to the chamber, and before the droplet hits, it crosses an IR sensor that triggers the flash to go off a few milliseconds later, capturing the unique crown shape of the impact. No schematic is available as yet, but comments at the bottom of the post suggest one will be coming soon.

5 thoughts on “Arduino PhotoLab

  1. I’m not sure what artist it was… and I can t find any info on the subject. But there is a very famous drawling either by MC Escher or Salvador Dali. Apparently the artist studied a drop of water over and over observing every detail hours and even days on end to capture the perfection of the water droplet. It is astonishing someone with out this technology could register in their mind and capture this instantaneous fragment of time.
    This hack is proof of where there is a will there is a way, man and his gifts of logic experiment and achievements. This hack paves the way for a future of endless possibilities. A person did this, not a company, and with common items.

Leave a Reply to amkCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.