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Capturing Lightning

Discussion in 'General Talk Forum' started by jovian, Mar 4, 2012.

  1. jovian

    jovian Member

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    My wife enjoys photography quite a bit and one of the things she likes to photograph is lightning. This is all fine and good but it is notoriously difficult to get good photos of this phenomenon through manualy pressing the shutter quick enough or even with bulb setting holding the shutter open for a minute or two. As an example it is not uncommon to only get 2 or 3 photos out of 100 that turn out nice. Additionally lightning photos during the day you might as well forget about. Well for a fun project I looked up how to build a lightning trigger for her camera online then designed, made and populated a circuit board, case, and wire for her camera. Fortunately enough I had ordered some polymorph which had arrived just in time so I used that to make the case. Fritzing was used to design the board. Once this was completed we ended up having to wait several weeks before we had a decent storm to test it out on.

    Lightning lasts about 100 ms the program (the chip is a attiny85 programmed with my arduino) takes about 1ms to trigger and the camera takes about 70ms from sensing the shutter to taking the picture. In practice the detector is very sensitive with bright enough flashes from behind the camera causing it to trigger. As such not every photo has lightning in it unless its in the Field of view but it sure beats standing in the rain. Previous attempts at taking photos my wife was lucky to get 2 decent photos out of a storm like was here a couple nights ago. with the detector we were able to get about 20 or 30 photos with something in it! Attached files [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG] [​IMG]
     
  2. Tweakie

    Tweakie Member

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    Excellent project and nice photos of the end result.

    Tweakie.
     
  3. rcav8r

    rcav8r Moderator Staff Member

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    :cool: project. I love (to try) taking pictures of lightning. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) we don't have very many lightning storms here. And as you pointed out the hope method doesn't pan out too well.

    Do you have a link to the circuit? And where did you get the Polymorph.... that looks like some interesting stuff.

    I have the same camera, I think. EOS? How does it trigger the shutter? I have a remote trigger I use for low light/tripod and nature situations, but it is IR.
     
  4. jovian

    jovian Member

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    I can't get a direct link but found the circuit on glacialwanderer.com should just be able to look for lightning trigger. Alternatively go to the project page on the freeduino website and look for lightning trigger there it will have a link. one thing to note is that the circuit there doesn't show the actual trigger to the camera. I just used a npn transistor for the appropriate switch.

    I got the polymorph from sprkfun. Its about the same cost as filament for a 3d printer. The sensor is a IR transistor from Radio shack thats back biased. The camera is indeed and EOS 550d or 500d t2i

    This certainly makes it much easier to get photos.
     
  5. jovian

    jovian Member

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    The shutter get triggered by completing the circuit from the focus or shutter tab with the ground and uses a standard 2.5mm. I initially thought it need 3.3V down the line But that IS NOT the case just complete the circuit so like I mentioned above I used a npn transistor with the collector on the shutter tab and the emitter on the ground then the output from the MicroController to the base.
     
  6. rcav8r

    rcav8r Moderator Staff Member

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    OK, found one of the links... http://www.glacialwanderer.com/hobbyrobotics/?p=16
    It may take me a while to absorb that... :ugeek:

    I did search freeduino , but it took me back to the above.

    That Polymorph is pretty cool stuff. Never heard of it before, but Mr. Google sure has :)

    So basically your using the white box to look for sudden changes in light level, then it fires an IR emitter that triggers the camera? The circuit on the above page shows the input, but no output..
     
  7. jovian

    jovian Member

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    You got the link i used.
    You are nearly correct on the func of the white box. It senses changes in light in the IR band and it then simply closes the shutter circuit through a npn transistor (not shown in the schematic) to tell the camera to snap the pic.

    This works cause lightning emits across nearly all wavelengths from radio to xray

    You also dont see the transistor in my circuit cause i misunderstood that part when i designed it and instead piped 3.3V direct to the trigger plug. This worked but caused some funkyness with the cam when plugged in. It Was to later to modify the pcb once i understood my mistake so i ended up soldering the npn directly to the camera plug.
     

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