[Maurice] let us know that his latest photography tool for hackers, the Camera Axe 3.0, is now available. The original allowed you to trigger a high-speed flash and camera from a multitude of sensors, including light and sound. The new one does all that, but also: allows multiple cameras or multiple flashes, clean up of software to make it more user adaptable, and the best (arguably the most important) part – cheaper components! All that and more under the Creative Commons that we do love so much. Keep up the amazingly detailed and just pure awesome work [Maurice].

Popped balloons or bullets fired into apples, anyone can photograph with a quick sound based camera rig. Lasers have been used forever in motion detection. And even door bell chimes have been used before for remote camera shutter releases. No, [SaskView] wanted to go further and created his Laser Triggered High-Speed Photography setup, to photograph (of all things) milk splashes. We liked the simplicity of the project however;  requiring no programmed microchips or overly complicated circuitry – rather he took a quick trip to the local dollar shop, used the amazing CHDK firmware, and he produced perfect results every time.

[Update: CHDK, not CHKD firmware. My mind must be elsewhere. Thanks jbot and agent smith]

[Phillip] published this great step by step tutorial on making a remote shutter release from a wireless doorbell. The pictures are great and the process is fairly simple. There is only one additional chip requred and a little bit of soldering. This is a great way to get some remote shots for cheap.

[via Lifehacker]

[Jared Bouck] has been sending in his projects for a couple years now. We’ve enjoyed his heavy-duty DDR pads, LCD backlight repair, and ion cooling projects. His latest, an RC paintball gun turret, is our favorite though. He actually rates this as one of the easier projects he’s published; it just took a while to assemble. Several design decisions were made to keep the project simple. Two 32 Degrees Icon-E paintball guns were used. The guns already have electric solenoids for firing, so a special trigger mechanism didn’t have to be fashioned. Q-loaders were used to prevent any ball feed problems. The motors, driver boards, and RC components are all borrowed from combat robots for reliability. He’s hoping to produce a small number of kits based on this design.

Related: We’ve got quite a few sentry gun projects in the archive.

The people at [Hobby Robotics] decided to build a trigger circuit for lightning photography. There are more complex ways to do this, but they just used a photo transistor and an Arduino. The Arduino watches the photo transistor’s value and compares it to the previously captured one. If the difference is above a certain threshold, it means a rapid change in the amount of light has occurred, which triggers the shutter. An earlier post covered how to directly control the Canon 30d using an Arduino. All of this works because the shutter lag and code execution together are less than lighting’s 100ms duration.