Raspberry Pi - Hacking a Canon DSLR shutter release (part 1)

In a previous post I created a simple timed shutter release from an Arduino, and used this to create a couple of time lapse videos. The drawback of this was that changing timing was a little tough - you had to update the source code and reflash the program to the Arduino.

Since I had a Raspberry Pi sitting around with similarly simple programmable GPIO pins I created a simple web frontend. Again hooking up the shutter release involved a pretty simple circuit based around a NPN transistor - I selected a random GPIO pin (pin 12):

The program uses the RPi.GPIO package to take the pictures, and the web frontend is a simple Bootstrap interface served by CherryPy. Currently all you can do is start/stop the timer, change the timing, take a picture ad-hoc.

I wrote this during winter and tried to capture a bit of snowmelt:

Codehttps://github.com/smcl/RPiEOS