Intervalometer project Arduino programming question

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Anyone out there familiar with the wiring program used by the Arduino environment, and how to set up several delay() statements, without one block or another summing the delays and messing up the hardware timing.

[bojan]

Hardly worth the effort..
try this instead:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/LCD-Timer-Rem...item20b3b5d24a
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Nikos-C8-Time...item35ac5510a6

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

not at all... ...and just to think, I was having fun... The cheaper one may suit a 1000D.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

If anyone is interested. Finally, I've had time to sit down and work through the programming steps for this little Arduino project - ATMEGA 168. I like designing things... however odd!

I have also designed a small dithering robot/mechanism (called the Ditherbot or Sparehand) for pushing buttons on my GEM hand controller - I don't want to pull it apart and start soldering, drilling holes etc., (as it's practically an antique and has a negative earth - I don't want to interface at that level), so I've come up with a stepper design that sweeps a toggle plate pressing buttons as it goes. It's set up to dither between shots (of course), including a mirror lock-up/sensor cool delay. No pictures yet, but will post when its complete.

Now that the sequence is under control, a dithering pattern needs to be worked out. At the moment its just doing a box pattern... agricultural - a little experimentation will sort out the motor speed and angular increments to achieve a reasonable pattern.

It needs a frame limit and shutdown sequence. In the future an external timer will be used to power/wake-up at whatever time of the night - but that's pier time. Given the limited space in my yard a small geodesic cover will probably be adequate as I'm not mounting telescopes.

[bojan]

Negative (or you meant positive ??) GND should not be the problem.. That's where optocouplers are the way to go if you are not sure

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Hi Bojan. It's a positive earth - did I say negative Anyway, the software is complete and putting the final touches to the button pushing bot. I'm using an opto coupler for the Arduino board camera interface. It's just about ready for testing.

With help from one of the guys on the Arduino forum dithering is now a square box spiral. It will need fine tuning to get the stepper speed just right.

The session time needs to be uploaded for each session, but its fairly easy to work out. In anycase it wont shut down until the board time >= session time and the last exposure complete. It won't shutdown in the middle of an image. Set and forget.

Now it needs wake-up/power up and power down. At the moment power is controlled by an external timer.

Once it's complete I'll post some images.