Timed Digi-Cam

Here’s a little project that I found a while back when looking for a way to take aerial photographs from a kite. I needed a way to trigger the shutter for the camera for the ground, and had toyed with the idea of some sort of radio-based triggering, but decided to go with a simple timer. The circuit connects to a simple, low-resolution digital camera (which is not the Stylecam mentioned in the article, but similar enough to work) that I got for Christmas a few years ago. I soldered directly on to a few points of the camera - +5, ground, and one side of the push-button that operates the shutter. The heart of the circuit is the classic 555 timer which sends a pulse out roughly once every five seconds that lasts long enough to simulate pressing the push-button. With the capacity of the camera limited to 20 pictures, this lasts for a little over a minute and a half – usually long enough to get the camera and kite up to a decent height for interesting pictures.