By N6VMO

Our big off-road riding season kicks off at Thanksgiving. We gather with family and friends as well as several thousand other off-road enthusiasts in the western Mojave.

This has been a project on my list for some time. I have wanted to create a time-lapse movie of the entire weekend event. This requires the camera, a Nikon D40 DSLR, to snap photos every 6 minutes or so, over the course of 5+ days. It also means the camera needs to be hidden on a remote hilltop to encompass a large area.

I have envisioned using my laptop and DIYPhotoBits, http://www.diyphotobits.com, but this requires the laptop to be connected to the camera and enough power to run both for 5+ days. Not to mention leaving my expensive Nikon and laptop unattended in the middle of the desert.

Recently, I stumbled across an IR project that used an Arduino microcontroller to pulse an infrared LED to trigger a Nikon DSLR. This project simulates the Nikon ML-L3 Wireless remote control, but without human intervention.
http://blog.tinyenormous.com/2009/09/30/17-arduino-nikon-ir-intervalometer-code

Not being familiar with the Arduino, but knowledgeable using PIC microcontrollers, I decided to adapt it to a PIC16F648A, with an enhancement.

The Arduino project uses a potentiometer to set the time interval between shots. My PIC version uses 5 SPST (single pole/single throw) switches to set the time interval using a binary coded decimal scheme.
Switches 1 through 4 allow the photographer to select any number between 1 and 15, while switch 5 selects either seconds or minutes. The minimal interval is 1 second and the maximum interval is 15 minutes.

As an example, turning on switches 1 and 3 sets the interval to 5 seconds. The same switch settings and turning on switch 5, sets the interval to 5 minutes. This modification to the Arduino project simplifies and provides a faster, more accurate means of setting the interval.

The entire project can be downloaded from:
http://www.n6vmo.com/YitIRp/YitIRp.zip

The .zip file includes the PIC software files, schematic, PCB, and list of materials.

N6VMO

http://www.sbprojects.com/projects/nikon/index.htm

Good luck on your project, let me know if you get it working!

Cheers,
Matt

i’m a student in informatic engineering in Italy, i’d like to implement your work in hardware, with VHDL language.
it’s a project for university, NON COMMERCIAL.
i’d like to talk a bit with you…
where did you found documentation or datasheet to know how “talk” to camera and timing?

does anyone where i could found those info/datasheet to know how dialogate with camera?

thanks a lot
giacomo

Just seen your code – for those like me that don’t have the Nikon remote I built my own IR sequencer to do the same thing:

http://luckylarry.co.uk/2009/07/arduino-ir-remote-intervalometer-for-nikon-d80-that-means-timelapse-photography-yarrr/

So you just stick an IR LED in the pin 13 of Arduino and send the pulsed signal to send to the camera to take the photo.

Cheers,

Larry

http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/category/arduinowiring/800

Thank a lot!!

I got your code compiling (and therefore working of course) on the latest 0017 Arduino IDE.

You just need to substitute

#include “WConstants.h” with #include “WProgram.h”

to get rid of the compiler errors.

That does the trick… Thanks for this nice bit of code.

Thanks for the most excellent code. I used it for my Nikon Lightning remote.

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