Photography, Arduino and Software tips

I was on a photography lightning kick for a little while… whenever a storm struck in Brooklyn I ran to my deck, set up the camera on a tripod and opened the timer for 30 seconds, hoping that luck was on my side (in every respect) and that everything was pointing in the right direction to capture a bolt or 2 in my lens. This process usually takes about 20 minutes, involves me getting soaked, and scares the absolute %^$# out of me when the storm gets closer. Needless to say, I’ve lucked out every once in a while and captured the odd picture like this:

Well, as I was slouched my laptop last night I came across Maruice Ribble’s website (what a cool name!): Glacial Wanderer. The site has some very cool and simple projects with Miss Arduino and her trusty friends (XPORT, etc.). But he also has a great program/hack to detect lightning and set off a camera trigger to fire your shutter, all in 67ms, while lighting sticks around for a 100ms.

In the Robotics section of his site there are other super simple projects that are really well documented and tremendiously useful. The code is all there for you, diagrams, circuits and photos. It’s a nice little resource for some camera and sensor hacks.