Etharooni designed this wonderful intervalometer to help him take awesome photos with his camera. He writes:
Entry-level Nikon DSLRs don’t have many built in features that the higher-end cameras do, like an interval timer, for instance. It’s an exceedingly useful feature. If you want to take star trails, time lapse, repetitive self-timer shooting, or whatever, an intervalometer is really important.
Another feature that Nikon seems to have forgotten about for us lower-class photographers, is a built in, physical, connected cable release. If that existed, this project wouldn’t be that spectacular. What they do have, though, is an infrared sensor for taking photos with a remote. So, logically, I took advantage of that for the project.
He has a nice write-up about the project, including schematic, Gerber files, source code, and even a list of things to change for version 2.
22 thoughts on “DIY intervalometer for Nikon DSLR cameras”
Comments are closed.
Nikon actually sales a software to do interval shots: Nikon Capture
Certainly, and there are also hardware modules that can be purchased to do the same thing, but it’s much more fun to make your own :-).
Thanks for writing about this! It was a fun project.
Thanks for sharing it!
Very nice. I set up a similar board but have yet to finish the code for it.
Some features that wouldn’t be too difficult to implement: trigger on sound level, light level, prox sensor, etc.. Although the lag is far to much to catch say, a balloon popping.
A trigger for an external flash would also be nice, to get some fun strobe effects.
Yeah, there’s actually a header on the far right that allows photos to be taken with external circuitry. I found that, with manual focus, it takes a little less than 300ms for the camera to snap a picture.
Is it a trick of the light, or do the leads on the AVR (microcontroller) look like they are painted on? I keep looking, and they continue to look completely flat.
Heh. Nope. I just used a big ol’ piece of paper to bounce a flash off of, and it does weird things with light.
Makes me want to get a start on one for my Canon XSi…right now all I have is a bulky calculator to do this!
Nikon DSLRs don’t have many built in features that the higher-end cameras do, like an interval timer, for instance.
Camera Nikon