Saturday 26 February 2011

Camera flash trigger project

When drops collide


OK so I've seen a few camera flash projects based on the Arduino, but here's my take on the problem: How to fire the flash to capture a very quick action on camera?

The first problem was 'how do I trigger a flash without frying my Arduino board and/or USB port?'...

Some digging around on the web and I eventually found that a camera flash simply works when its trigger pins/terminals are connected together, so no fancy digital signal generators etc required - unless you're talking to a modern flash with zoom, TTL etc :-/  That might be another project...

For my flash trigger I went wireless both for flexibility on where the flash can be positioned and because it meant I could trigger a nice low voltage wireless flash master instead of a buzzing, IC-melting, kilovolt flash unit :) My wireless trigger set is the el-cheapo Chinese type you can get from Amazon and Ebay.