Tech Olive

One interest of mine is seeing how things change over time, especially recording the change over time. The problem with simply video taping something, say as useless as a sunset, is perhaps the amount of film/HDD space it would take, and why bother re-watching it, even at 8x speed it would take 22 minutes to watch a 3 hour long sunset! So why not skip some of the repetitive bits, and just take a picture every 5 minutes? It saves hard drive space and when played back, it can be compiled into 3 minutes with a rather cool flip-book effect.

The part count is relatively simple. First you’ll need a camera that you don’t mind somewhat destroying. In my case it was a $10USD Wal-mart 2.1MP rip-off, and an analog clock (it MUST tick!). That’s all you need! Tools are the usual: tape, soldering iron (and associated items), wire, and time!

First up, the camera, and the camera opened (and being held together with tape). All I had to do was pry off the front, and the top buttons were easily accessible. No need to take it apart any further (but I did for grins). The final picture shows two wires soldered to the shutter button (the button you press to take the picture, for the non-photography guru).

If you’ve come this far, you’re already half way done! The next part is where ‘auto’ comes in. Strip the clock of everything except the black plastic ‘time base’. Inside of the time piece, you should see a spool of wire around a chunk of metal (electromagnet), some gears, and a tiny circuit board – the latter being all we care about. 4 wires should be coming off of the circuit board: two for power (usually red and black) and two connected to the electromagnet (usually both copper). Unsolder all, but remember where each went.

Find your own power source (I used a PC power supply with some resistors) and solder it back onto the circuit board. Next, you’ll solder one of the two wires from the cameras shutter button to the negative/ground on your power supply (doesn’t matter which wire you choose). Finally solder the last wire from your camera to one of the places the copper wires were soldered (doesn’t matter which copper pad, both are pulsed every 2 seconds).

I also added some LEDs in serial with my wires. Every time it pulses, one of the two LEDs blinks!

It might take some configuring on which to turn on first: the camera, or the power supply. Eventually you should be taking pictures automatically! A nifty thing about the cheapness of my camera is that it wouldn’t let me take more than one picture every couple of minutes, even though the pulse to take a picture is sent every 2 seconds!

I placed the camera on a stand and aimed it toward my driveway and went to work, hopeful of catching the neighbors coming and stealing my newspaper. But alas, the battery on my camera died and corrupted my SD card (and thus why there are so few pictures and no video).

Another interesting thing a user might try is instead of soldering a time piece to the two wires, solder a photo-resistor. Every time someone comes into the room (and assuming they turn on the light) it will take a picture. Caught red handed!

If you have any questions, please e-mail me at kobaj.g [at] gmail [dot] com.