Power, resistors and relays
I designed and built a passive infrared trigger for my Canon EOS 5D camera (will work with any camera with a remote shutter release socket) to take pictures when something (an animal) sets off the PIR sensor. This will allow me to set the camera up to automatically capture anythng that moves in front of the sensor. I used a microcontroller to control the camera wake up and shutter release relays. This gives me the ability to control the frequency and number of shots. For the prototype I trigger the wake up relay for 300ms then the shutter release relay for 300ms followed by a 300ms pause before checking the input again to see if there is still movement in front of the PIR sensor. I also put a long delay (1 second) after 5 continuous shots. Depending on results I may replace this long delay with a wait until the PIR is no longer being triggered to prevent too many pictures of one event if the animal stays in range of the PIR sensor for a while. The cool thing is that the camera can go into sleep mode allowing the battery to last for days as the circuit wakes the camera up when movement is detected.
Power, resistors and relays
I designed and built a passive infrared trigger for my Canon EOS 5D camera (will work with any camera with a remote shutter release socket) to take pictures when something (an animal) sets off the PIR sensor. This will allow me to set the camera up to automatically capture anythng that moves in front of the sensor. I used a microcontroller to control the camera wake up and shutter release relays. This gives me the ability to control the frequency and number of shots. For the prototype I trigger the wake up relay for 300ms then the shutter release relay for 300ms followed by a 300ms pause before checking the input again to see if there is still movement in front of the PIR sensor. I also put a long delay (1 second) after 5 continuous shots. Depending on results I may replace this long delay with a wait until the PIR is no longer being triggered to prevent too many pictures of one event if the animal stays in range of the PIR sensor for a while. The cool thing is that the camera can go into sleep mode allowing the battery to last for days as the circuit wakes the camera up when movement is detected.