ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION SERIAL
ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION SOFTWARE
ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION CODE
ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION PC

Supports multiple simultaneous steppers, with independent concurrent stepping on each stepper.

From the AccelStepper site:ДЄccelStepper significantly improves on the standard Arduino Stepper library in several ways:

Luckily there is a library which deals with all of these problems for you, and also allows for much more complex stepper control, AccellStepper. To be able to use more than 3 motors at the same time some clever handling of the timers would be necessary. I looked in to using timers to prevent blocking, but the arduino only has 3 hardware timers. This approach did not work with more than one motor because the delay command I had been using, to set the time between switching the step output, blocked the processor from doing anything else for the duration of the delay. I found it was more difficult than I expected to drive two steppers simultaneously, previously I had been simply switching the stepping output and waiting a set amount of time before switching again to control the motor. Here is a video from matthew spinks where he explains his project.

ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION SERIAL

He also has a sketch for the arduino, to receive the serial information, I used a little bit of this, but mainly wrote my own.

ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION CODE

I had to modify his code a little to rescale the outputs and add control for an extra axis, this was fairly straightforward. I adapted code from Matthew Spinks to read the state of the controller and send it to the arduino over serial.

ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION PC

I used a processing LINK sketch on my PC to read the input from the controller and send it using serial to the Arduino. I spent some time getting an xbox controller communicating with my rig, from my research it would seem that it is not feasible to connect the xbox controller directly to the arduino. Previously I had been moving one axis at a time, this was adequate for shoot-move-shoot operation, but I was interested in being able to control all axes concurrently for live motion control. Recently I made a panning, tilting and sliding camera mount for timelapse photography, I had some trouble adapting my code to allow me to move all three axes at once.

Xbox pan tilt from Steven Brace on Vimeo.Д¬ontrolling multiple stepper motors simultaneously can be challenging using the arduino platform.

Here is a quick video of my work in progress, unfortunately the motors are rather loud due to the relatively cheap drivers, but as this is only for timelapse noise is not a problem. When the arduino makes pin 7 HIGH, the relay closes and tells the camera to take a picture.Recently I have been working on controlling my time lapse motion control rig with a standard xbox 360 controller, I have written this brief post to give pointers to anyone else who may be trying to accomplish anything similar. The green wire connects the other relay coil pin to ground. In the picture above the yellow wire is connected from arduino pin 7 to a coil pin on the relay. If a wire from the shutter is connected to the вЂњCOMвЂќ and вЂњN.O.вЂќ pins on the relay then activating the relay takes a picture. In laymen terms, proving a 5V signal to the coil closes the switch. The wiring diagram included with the relay distills theВ operationВ of the relay quite nicely. The next step was to use aВ normallyВ open relay (sourced from RadioShack) to control when the shutter was activated. Touching the free ends of each of these wires together isВ equivalentВ to pushing the shutter button to take a picture. I soldered a wire to each of the copper terminals. It is difficult to tell from the picture, but pressing the shutter button pushes two copper terminals together sending a signal to the camera to take the picture. To modify the camera I disassembled the camera cover and removed the button that activates the shutter.

ARDUINO CAMERA TIME LAPSE OPERATION SOFTWARE

Following the instructable here, I was able to turn an old digital camera into a time lapse camera using an arduino, a relay, and an open source software program called makeAVI (windows).

Arduino camera time lapse operation