johntwomey

At Emutex, we create and sell great software to professional companies building solutions. From time to time, we also build proofs of concept, prototypes and demos. We do this to educate, to promote awareness, to enable hobbyists and to demonstrate what we can achieve.

 

John Twomey - CEO.

Timelapse Rail for DSLR Camera

 

Emutex display Timelapse Rail Demo at Maker Faire 2014.

 

This article gives a brief overview of one of these demos, which was an Intel® Edison controlled Timelapse controller for a DSLR Camera.

The controller consisted of a hardware rail with a motorised dolly on which a camera was mounted, and the movement and camera operation was programmed from a remote application on an iPhone. Everything was contolled by the Edison, which created a Wi-Fi Hotspot for the iPhone to connect into, and controlled the GPIO pins which drove the camera shutter and motor.

 

Software

The back-end software was a node-js based server application, which listened for commands from the remote client app. In turn, this server app could then talk to the GPIO pins on the Edison Arduino board to control the motor on the rail, and trigger the camera to take pictures. This part of the back-end was implemented using wiring-x86, a python library that Emutex have developed to hide the complexity of the GPIO Pin multiplexing behind a very easy-to-use set of functions for GPIO programming on the Intel® Galileo, Inte®l Galileo Gen2, and now Intel® Edison.

The client consisted of an iPhone app, which is basically simple screen where the three necessary parameters for the time lapse could be entered.

  1. The number of seconds to pulse the motor between shots.
  2. The number of seconds to delay after taking a picture.
  3. The number of pictures.

 

iPhone App

The screen where the three necessary parameters for the time-lapse could be entered.

emutex MyLapse phone 3

Timelapse Rail on show!

The Timelapse Rail on show at the European Maker Faire 2014 in Rome.

emutex MyLapse 2

iPhone App

The configuration screen allows the back-end IP address of the Edison Camera controller.

emutex MyLapse phone settings 4

 

Hardware

At the core of the system was an Intel® Edison on an Arduino baseboard with a custom Arduino shield which was designed to driver DC motors and also trigger a DSLR camera. With suitable cables, a connection can be made between the shield and the camera, and between the shield and the motor, so the Edison can then drive them via software. 

 

emutex MyLapse 5

 

Also shown in the image above is the Wi-Fi pigtail connecting into the on-board Wi-Fi, which allows connection of a larger Wi-Fi whip antenna. The Edison has built-in Wi-Fi, so this makes wireless based projects very easy.  

 

Contact Us

The videos that were on show at the Maker Faire can be seen on David's website at http://www.davidhunt.ie/gallerys/timelapse/

For more information on this project you can contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

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