I have been wanting to catch lightning for some time, and with the purchase of the CameraAxe, I thought my dreams had come true.
Think again, I discover that my Olympus E520 has a shutter lag of 300ms, miles too slow.
So I looked towards my other camera, the Panasonic FZ50, which is said to have a very quick response time, still more problems, I find that it has an entirely different remote triggering system than other cameras. It works on resistances, and could not be triggered via the CameraAxe.
The only way out of this was to build a unit that would give me what I am after. So I decided to build one around the Arduino Microcontroller, I set about designing a board, it had two reed relays, one for focus, the other the shutter, though I ended up not needing the focus, as I used manual settings.
I have two Camera/ Flash ports, one for the Panasonic, the other for flash and other cameras, though having the CameraAxe I doubt I will use this trigger much. There are two sensor ports, one set for greater than the threshold the other for less than, also a dedicated laser port. Three pots handle the two thresholds and the delay settings.
Not knowing anything of programming made it somewhat difficult, but finally I got it up and running. Now we come to the other problem, no lightning, plenty of rain as seen by the dreadful flooding.
So in the mean time I am working on a multi-laser trigger, so I can capture birds flying to my feeder. I have made and tested a board, consisting of a 5volt regulated power circuit to run the lasers independent of the Arduino Camera trigger,(or the Axe) with a Tip120 transistor to act as a switch, triggered via the Arduino unit.My main reason for this, with each laser pulling between 15 and 20 ma, this would have put a great deal of pressure on the Analog pins, I plan to use 5 laser modules, my main concern is how to wire the corresponding light sensors. I tried daisy chaining them, that didn’t work to well, In the end I decided to try an AND Gate, also not too flash, getting the wrong signals at the output.
after trying several other Gate’s, without much success, I searched the net and asked many questions , and finally found I needed a Nand gate, with a hex inverter between each photo transistor and the Gate, with another inverter at the output, This worked great on my Arduino test setup, but I found that using a NOR GATE did the same job, and only used one IC, so this is the way I have gone.
The laser unit having been built and working meant having two separate units to contend with, so as I was having to make a board for the sensors, I decided to combine the two together.
Below is the diagram of how I built it, because of the shutter lag I will have to use the FZ50 camera.
The laser and sensor rods are removable, so they can be used for other things, the support frame can fold flat for easy storage.The sensor And laser poles have the connecting sockets built in.
I run this from a 12v 4amp sealed lead acid battery.
