Controlling A Point And Shoot With Bluetooth

September 12, 2014 by 1 Comment

Loading point and shoot digital cameras is old hat around here, but [Alex] and [Andreas] are taking it to the next level. They’ve made a Bluetooth controller for a cheap Canon camera, allowing pictures to be taken with an iPhone or Android device.

The camera in question is a Canon IXUS70, although any camera supported by CHDK will work. We’ve seen a few builds using this firmware to take pictures of the sunrise every day and transmitting images over a radio link, but this build is far more interactive.

The camera is connected to an Arduino and Bluetooth shield with a hacked up USB cable. The ‘duino communicates with a phone using a JQuery app, giving any phone with a Bluetooth module control of the camera’s zoom and shutter.

All the code is available on the github, with a very good video demonstration of the build available below.

Continue reading “Controlling A Point And Shoot With Bluetooth” →

Enjoying The Sunrise Every Single Day

July 27, 2014 by 21 Comments

Exif_JPEG_PICTURE

[Andy] wanted to take a few at sunrise, but waking up before sunrise has obvious problems associated with it. Instead, he built a device that calculates the local sunrise time, snaps a picture, and goes to sleep until the next morning.

The camera used for the project was an old Canon point and shoot, chosen for the ability to load CHDK firmware. Other electronics included an Arduino pro mini, a LiPo battery and charger board, real time clock, and an old Nokia LCD for the user interface.

There’s quite a bit of code that goes into figuring out when the sun will rise each day, but once that’s figured out, all [Andy] has to do is take the camera somewhere pretty, point it East, and record a few days worth of sunrises. When put into a ‘game camera’ enclosure, its rugged enough to stand up to everything except a thief, and has enough battery power for a few weeks worth of sunrises.

Video demonstrating the local sunrise time below.

Continue reading “Enjoying The Sunrise Every Single Day” →

An Affordable Full Body Studio Grade 3D Scanner

March 7, 2014 by 32 Comments

Looking for a professional 3D scanning setup for all your animation or simulation needs? With this impressive 3D scanning setup from the folks over at [Artanim], you’ll be doing Matrix limbos in no time!  They’ve taken 64 Canon Powershot A1400 cameras to create eight portable “scanning poles” set up in a circle to take 3D images of, well, pretty much anything you can fit in between them! 

Not wanting to charge 64 sets of batteries every time they used the scanner or to pay for 64 official power adapters, they came up with a crafty solution: wooden batteries. Well, actually, wooden power adapters to be specific. This allows them to wire up all the cameras directly to a DC power supply, instead of 64 wall warts.

To capture the images they used the Canon Hack Development Kit, which allowed them to control the cameras with custom scripts. 3D processing is done in a program called Agisoft Photoscan, which only requires a few tweaks to get a good model. Check out [Artanim’s] website for some excellent examples of 3D scanned people.

Continue reading “An Affordable Full Body Studio Grade 3D Scanner” →

Digital Camera Becomes Video Transmitter

September 12, 2013 by 21 Comments

canon

In the arena of high altitude balloons, Canon’s PowerShot series of digicams are the camera du jour for sending high into the stratosphere. There’s a particular reason for this: these cameras can run the very capable CHDK firmware that turns a $100 digicam into a camera with a built-in intervalometer along with a whole bunch of really cool features. It appears this CHDK firmware is much more powerful than we imagined, because [Chris] is now transmitting pictures taken from a Canon a530 to the ground, using only the CHDK firmware and a cheap radio module.

These PowerShot cameras have an ARM processor inside that runs VxWorks, a minimal but very capable OS for embedded devices and Mars rovers. By tying in to the Tx and Rx lines of the camera, [Chris] can issue commands to the OS, change settings, and even install his own code.

With the help of [Phil Heron]’s SSDV encoder written in C, [Chris] was able to get the camera to transmit images  with a small radio transmitter that fits in the battery compartment. Right now, [Chris] has only built the CHDK + SSDV for the Canon a530, but with how useful this build is, we expect to see an improved version very shortly.

Simple Power Adapter Thumbs Its Nose At Proprietary Connectors

June 5, 2012 by 19 Comments

[Mike Worth] wanted to use his camera for some time-lapse photography. Since it’s used to take many pictures over a long period of time, he doesn’t want to deal with batteries running low. But there’s no standard power jack on the side; instead the official charger consists of an adapter that is inserted in place of the batteries. Rather than break the bank with the special cable, [Mike] made his own battery compartment A/C adapter.

You can see that it is made up of two parts. The first is a standard wall wart that outputs the correct voltage and has an acceptable current rating. The other part is the adapter cable that connects to the camera on one end, and has a barrel jack on the other. [Mike] rolled some paperboard around a pencil until it matched the diameter of a AA battery. Once of the cylinders has a thumb tack for the negative lead, and the other uses a screw and washer for the positive side. He soldered some wire to these and he’s in business.

He must be snapping photos frequently enough to avoid the auto-shutoff feature. That or he’s disabled it with the use of some custom firmware.

3d Printing Saves The Day For Time-lapse Photography

May 15, 2012 by 21 Comments

Several of us here at Hackaday have discussed how much we’d like to have some tools, like a 3d printer, but just can’t justify the cost. What would we make? Why do we really need one? Why don’t we just bother [Brian Benchoff] who already has one to make us parts instead. That’s usually how the conversation goes.

[Alexander Weber] gave us another little reason to drop in our “list of reasons we need a 3d printer” list with this little hack. He wanted to play with CHDK but found the camera’s battery unable to stay alive for longer than 2 hours. There is a commercially available adapter to allow you to plug into the wall, but the cost was outrageous. At least it is outrageous to someone who already owns a 3d printer. We just need a few hundred more dollars worth of reasons to justify that sweet 3d printer we’ve been pining over.

[via Adafruit]

Adding A Remote Shutter To A Cheap Digital Camera

April 30, 2012 by 10 Comments

[Luo] sent in a very easy way to add a remote shutter to just about any Canon Powershot. Even though it’s just a button, battery, and USB cable, we’re sure this would be a great project to teach the younglings about the power of soldering.

Some Canon Powershot digicams are impressive beasts with the ability to take time-lapse, long exposure, and high-speed photos. These cameras are generally crippled by their firmware, but by installing CHDK these features can be enabled.

[Luo] read the CHDK wiki and found the firmware has the ability to snap a picture whenever a button is pressed. All he had to do is send 5V down a USB cable. After whipping up shutter button housed in a tin of Eclipse gum and attaching a cable, [Luo] had a functional shutter.

With the CHDK firmware, you can do a lot of really interesting stuff with the old Canon camera sitting on your shelf: we’ve seen a lot of intervalometers and even a few book scanners that use a similar setup. Nice work, [Luo].