Remote Camera Shutter

I have succeeded in building a remote camera shutter for my Canon PowerShot SD850 digital still camera. I had to build one because there exists no such accessory, at least not one that is officially supported by Canon. You have to buy a DSLR camera to get a feature like remote shutter.

This remote shutter mod is made possible by some custom open source firmware, called CHDK, that is available for most Canon digital cameras. See this page for more information:

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Supercharge_Your_Camera_with_Open-Source_CHDK_Firmware#Play_Around

I have used this in the past to do unlimited interval shooting. I set an interval, say 10 seconds, and the camera takes a picture every 10 seconds until the battery dies, the memory card is full, or I tell it to stop. This has provided me with some pretty good pictures, but its not as good as being able to take the picture I want, when I want.

See this thread in the CHDK forums for information on building the remote shutter:

http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php/topic,294.105.html

Here is the simplest circuit:



And here is my first prototype:



I originally tried to power it with the 3V lithium battery suggested, but found that it did not provide enough voltage to trigger the shutter. I switched to the 3 AAA batteries seen in the image. That provides 4.5V to the usb port on the camera. It triggers the shutter every time. I also made a long USB cable (just cut a short cable in half and soldered extensions onto it.) and attached the camera to my Camera Boom. The button and camera couldn't have worked better and I am super pleased with the results. I do plan to build a more durable version and try to "stealth" the button a little better. In many of the pictures you can see my hand on the button and it looks a bit unnatural. Here is a few of the pictures I took today:







I will have the rest on my Flickr Page some time in the next few days.

EDIT: Pictures online here