Quick and Dirty Timelapse Photography

So as I prep for a roadtrip, the thought of timelapse occured to me. I have already made some random timelapse test videos using my old Canon Powershot A40 and the software that came with it, however portability was always an issue.

Today, that is no longer an issue, I built in a few hours a frame to hold my old camera and a servo motor, and controlled the entire setup using a Arduino. The setup includes a LCD for display purposes, but in general is meant to quickly satisfy the need to do timelapse for the roadtrip drive. I plan to improve this a little bit, perhaps add a LM317 vreg so the entire setup is self-contained and powered off a 12V wall-wart or battery pack, however time is at a premium.

An experiment in timelapse

Shot at 5 seconds/frame while sorting $43.50 in coins. Sadly my old Canon powershot A40 which I use for timelapse decided to stop working, apparently due to the year 2009 bug which recently struck all 30gb Zune players. Fortunately setting the date back to 2008 fixed the problem.

As a bonus for my loyal readers (do I have any?), I just got CHDK working on my Canon S5IS, and I plan to do both timelapse photography (probably once it warms up a bit for outdoor shots in Toronto), and highspeed photography. CHDK allows external triggering using the USB port (by applying +5V, it will trigger the shutter once the voltage is removed), and with the external trigger feature, I plan to build both a sound trigger, and a multi-xenon tube flash array so that high speed events can be triggered with high-intensity flash on sound, or other triggers (eg: opto, logic output, etc). This is a big project for the future, so stay tuned.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, leave a comment down below, and bookmark this blog!