Full-featured AVR time-lapse

posted Sep 24th 2010 7:31am by Mike Szczys
filed under: digital cameras hacks

This time-lapse photo trigger was built [Lukasz Goralczyk]. It is controlled by an ATmega168 and we were surprised to read that it uses about 12k of code. Curious about what takes up that much space, we were impressed to see all the features demonstrated in the video after the break. The small device, running on two AA batteries, has a well-designed user interface displayed on a 3V character LCD that is navigated with a clickable rotary encoder.

It isn’t the smallest intervalometer we’ve ever seen, but it deserves respect for the features packed into a diminutive form-factor.

[Thanks Michal]

Comments [11]

tagged: ATmega168, AVR, hd44780, rotary encoder, time-lapse

11 Responses to Full-featured AVR time-lapse

AS says:

September 24, 2010 at 8:49 am

Very nice. My biggest question with things like this is where to get the required plug to attach to the camera? For example many canon SLRs use a small 3 pin connector as shown here: http://tinyurl.com/26dld7x

Reply Report comment

michael says:

September 24, 2010 at 9:54 am

2.5mm adapters sold for ipods etc work well… My astro photography consists of me taking an ipod adapater.. and just jamming it into my camera.. when you go too far.. it just shorts the contacts.. I set it for 30 second shutter and let it be!

Reply Report comment

Physics-Dude says:

September 24, 2010 at 12:08 pm

What program can I use to combine all of the photos into a video file? I’m a Windows/Ubuntu user and don’t have Quicktime Pro.

Reply Report comment

Gben says:

September 24, 2010 at 12:20 pm

Nice logic under the hood, the knob seems interesting, is it a pot and button at the same time or a stepped switch and knob ?

Reply Report comment

Erik Johnson says:

September 24, 2010 at 1:11 pm

@Physics-Dude VirtualDub will do this at a set frame rate, it will automatically import all the frames if they are numbered sequentially, e.g. IMG_0334.JPG
IMG_0335.JPG
IMG_0336.JPG…

It has only rudimentary adjustments/filters, but gets the job done well.. for free and it runs under WINE as well

Reply Report comment

Yen says:

September 24, 2010 at 1:27 pm

@Physics-Dude
on Ubuntu, or Windows, you can also use ffmpeg to accomplish this.

from ffmpeg’s man page:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i foo-%03d.jpeg -r 12 -s WxH foo.avi

this will collect all images foo-000.jpeg through foo-999.jpeg, sequentially, into a video, at 12 frames per second.

Reply Report comment

Abbott says:

September 24, 2010 at 2:08 pm

@Gben

Judging from the ‘encoder’ on the PCB my guess would be a digital rotary encoder. useful things they are.

Reply Report comment

Maurice says:

September 24, 2010 at 3:34 pm

I’ve got pinout diagrams for 7 of the more common types of camera plugs. I did this for my Camera Axe project, which also includes a timelapse mode, but if you only want timelapse this is a more focused approach.

http://www.cameraaxe.com/wiki/index.php?title=CameraCables

Reply Report comment

Physics-Dude says:

September 24, 2010 at 3:38 pm

@Erik Johnson

I cant seem to import all frames in at once… I’m running VirtualDub in Windows XP

Reply Report comment

Ulrich Lukas says:

September 25, 2010 at 6:58 pm

Very decent stuff!

I have not looked at the code yet, but using LGPL code from AVRFreaks.net (like tinymenu), I expect this to be a solid implementation.

Thanks for sharing this, Lukasz!

I hope I find the time to complete my own project, which is a similar user interface for
a remote measuring device.

Examples like this encourage me to share my own
results, too!

Reply Report comment

Andrew Welker says:

September 26, 2010 at 7:44 am

I decided to help everybody out and post what I do to get ffmpeg to work on windows 7

I use Infraview to process to files and name them image0001.jpg image0002.jpg and so on.

Copy C:\ffmpeg\share to C:\usr\local so that your presets can be found at C:\usr\local\share\ffmpeg

Then i process it using this command line
c:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe -r 12 -i “C:\path\image%04d.jpg” -sameq -s hd1080 -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -crf 25 c:\OUTPUT.MP4

Reply Report comment