Arduino Laser Tripwire. Arduino microphone schematic. 2010 » April. Photographing Splashing Droplets Up until now I’ve been using a photogate sensor and the Camera Axe to take pictures of water and milk droplets. After some research I found many – people – online were using solenoid valves to create droplets and take pictures of them. The big advantage to this method is it’s easy to collide drops which is was very difficult and random using my old method. I decided I’d make a new valve sensor (pre-built version available here) for the Camera Axe and document how to make your own since I didn’t find any detailed instructions or part lists on the web.
Building It I knew I wanted to have a way to trigger my camera on a fairly long exposure in a dark room (I use a 1 second exposure). Then make a water droplet. The only new circuit I needed was a simple motor driver circuit to drive the solenoid. Next I had to find and order the parts. After assembly here is what it looks like: I also made a new version of the Camera Axe software with the valve sensor. Permalink. Lightning Shutter Trigger for a Camera. {*style:<b>Update: Check out my latest Camera Axe project for a much more robust device that handles this. </b>*} I knew there were devices that could trigger a camera to fire during a lightning strike, but their circuits were more complicated than I wanted to make. I’m a software guy not a hardware guy so I decided to use an Arduino and that allowed me to write a little code that made the circuit much simpler. Before I got started I looked at this wikipedia article about lightning so that I could verify this project would work.
It has a lot of interesting information about lightning, but the most useful piece of data in the wikipedia article is the time lapse shot of a lightning strike. From the time lapse photo I was able to determine the duration of a lightning strike is about 100 ms. The circuit I used to detect the light from the lightning was a very simple circuit that looked like the above circuit diagram.
I also needed a circuit to trigger the camera. Here is the code . Permalink. Arduino Camera Flash Control.