Arduino Photoduino

Links

• Official project page

My own

Contrary to what I've seen as other photoduino boxes, I chose to use a larger box so that I could store all the peripherals in it too.
See a pic of my box here.

My tips

Retroreflector barrier

For the laser barrier mode, it's much easier to do the following:

• Bring laser & sensor side-by-side, possibly in a little tube if ambient light is too bright
• Put a [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Retroreflector bicycle retroreflector (catadioptre in French) as target

Advantages:

• Retroreflector is a larget target than the photosensor, so alignment is easier
• Retroreflector angle doesn't matter that much
• Wires on the same side so it's very easy to cover large distances, I tried it over 4m (so 8m for the laser beam to travel back to the photosensor)

Delay between event and shooting

If you need an extra delay between the event and the actual shooting, you can use the "normal" mode and make use of the "autofocus time".

Ideas

• Maybe it's less confusing to have another specific option to setup a delay time between the sensor event and the rest of the program, this would also allow to have that delay in pre-bulb and mirror-lockup modes.
• Add 3.5 jack for supporting standard microphones
• Change the sensor config bargraph by a smooth bargraph, cf Arduino EMF
• We've a IR phototransistor, could we use it for a remote control mode? Would it be useful in some situations or the camera remote control receiver is enough? cf Practical Arduino book p44
• Barrier sensor settings are very different for IR and laser, it would maybe be better to have 2 separate sub-menus so each will remember its proper sensitivity setting.
• Option to use the light sensor in intervalometer mode to skip pics when dark, cf Practical Arduino book 49
• New menu to handle exposure times larger than 30s (the Canon battery grip with intervalometer has also this large exposure time mode, up to 99h)
• Provide a full control of the Photoduino via USB/serial interface, this would allow e.g
  • to load/store sets of parameters
  • to select modes & options from a terminal
  • to create setups where photoduino is controlled via a webserver, via twitter, whatever you can imagine.