Adding A Remote Shutter To A Cheap Digital Camera

April 30, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 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].

A Simple Dolly For Time-Lapse Photography

July 3, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 22 Comments

[Henrique] wrote in to tell us about his time-lapse photography hack. Triggering of the camera is done via CHDK, or Canon Hack Development kit. This experimental kit allows Canon Powershot cameras to run scripts as well as other neat features without permanently changing anything. User scripts for this hack and others can be found here.

Once the Camera was set up to take pictures in a predetermined amount of time, a LDR (light dependent resistor) is used to detect when a picture is actually taken. A LED on the camera flashes every time an image is stored in the camera, so this provided an easy way to sense when this happens.

Once this signal is received, a PIC 16f84 processor and the associated circuitry then causes the stepper to step once per shot. The results of this experiment are very impressive, so be sure to check out the results after the break.

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Digital Camera IR Filter Removal

December 20, 2006 by Will O'Brien 12 Comments

We’ve run across the idea of IR filter removal in the past. [Tony Z] pointed out this nice little how-to on removing the IR filter from a Canon a540 or a530 digital camera. I’m pretty blase about gutting electronics, but even I get a bit nervous about opening up recent model digi-cams. It’s so easy easy to jam sensitive gears… (don’t ask) Aside from my bad mini-dv experiences, the sub-200 6 megapixel platforms could make some interesting projects.