How i learnt to knead time, or my arduino intervalometer

So I made a Intervalometer for my Canon 400d camera at last. It’s another one that’s been in the endlessly long pipeline for a while. I based it on the wonderful Arduino and got a bit of code off the person that made the Intervaluino whic can be found here.

It was an excersize in how to design a PCB in Eagle and then mill it out on the Roland MDX-15 milling machine at work. At first I did a version of the Intervaluino, but one that all fit onto one board that was a shield that fit onto the arduino. I didn’t realise how cool making shields for the Arduino is before. They just clip together like lego and you can just stack them one after the other. Anyway I found that the 20mA or so that the Arduino gave out wasn’t enough to trigger the relay. After a brief lesson in transistors from Sam I put together a circuit that would definately trigger the relays and had an LED for both the focus and shutter lines.

Above is the schematic of the final circuit. Basically what happens is the Arduino pins 8 and 11 go hi to 5V, making the circuit around the realy. This puts out about 20mA, which isn’t very much,  so they turn on a transistor which allows the relay to access the current it needs to turn on. There’s one relay that connects the camera’s focus trigger to ground, which makes the camera focus and one relay that connects the camera shutter triggger to ground to take a picture. When taking time lapse movies it’s best to use manual focus so the focus pin is slightly redundant, but just in case….

I went through a few versions before I got the final working one.

I milled out 4 boards and populated and soldered 3 before I had one that finally worked. Frustrating!!!!

This is the first one. This is just cutting out the tracks with an engraving piece and not cutting away the unused copper. This makes it harder when your soldering, in case you make a mistake.

As you can see on this version, I had set the tracks too thin and hadn’t left enough room at their sides to mill away the unused copper.

This one is almost there, apart from I forgot to flip the pattern over. To make the components be on the opposite side from the Arduino, so they would fit on, I would have to solder every one onto the top side of the copper, whic is WAY too tricky for my patience.

Here’s that final version, with the bottom photo showing it connected to an Arduino and a 9V battery pack with the 2.5mm jack that connects to the camera coming out.

Message me if you want any of the files or if you know how I can upload them here.

Finally here’s a video made using it