cellphone triggered camera.

the portable capture unit, the larger box could be eliminated and the circuit inserted into the small holey box but the laptop was required for this implementation.

reflection

This final project felt like an introduction to the year two. An insight into the protocols for gaining clearance within AUT and getting permission from outside entities.

It's a interesting coincidence that Zak and I were in one of the introduction project groups. through the year we had been discussing our projects and discussing possible improvements even though not being in the same group. and have of gained a reputation for complicated projects, especially Zak. This project was the first time we had fully collaborated on since the early introduction projects,

We learnt lots:
never trust a power socket when your electrical current is vital to the the project.
complex wiring is a awesome but takes longer to debug.
modular building is the best way to make stuff portable, upgradeable and  reusable.
you can never have too much heat-shrink!
people are ridiculously hard to convince when you have the most to gain.


There was a interesting discussion with Charles which was how do you determine a successful project?
is it the technical soundness or achievement, or is is it the concept and how its portrayed to its audience?
In terms of technical and process we created a great project. brought down somewhat by the fact that no-one would give us permission to acheive the original concept.  If it was a gurrellia project I can imagine the result being the polar opposite. A projects success is subjective to perception, the presentation was a entity devised to fit within a deadline and in the end the project will be remebered for the technical acomplishments and the building a ecosystem to acheive this aplication. the assessments are formative afterall.
 It gives us a extremely good base to work off for the presentation of the semesters work. but thats for later :)

in terms of acheiveing the goals of the breif, all the groups appeared to have issue gaining a audience the only group that seemed to gain a audience was the one outside the libary in which people stopped to work out what was going on with 20 something people congregrated around a screen, then as soon as it clicked the left. maybe afterall the saturation of screens has really made us actively filter them out.

pre-presenting (0.8)

We approached businesses in Vulcan lane, ranging from well presented restaurants, to a cafe a story above. the first was going moderately well till we hit the "and how does it benefit us?" line. restaurants rely on creating an atmosphere a false ambiance to entice customers, and we were trying to insert a unknown variable into their meticulously maintained façade, potentially nullifying their aura of a traditional restaurant rupturing the perception of their customers, basically they would deluge into a overpriced McDonalds with fancy seating.

In the end we managed to get permission to use a quiet wee building across the road from O'roke hall, tall and thin with 3 layers with large windows visible. One of the earliest brainstorms from before Zak and I paired up was to light up windows sequentially. Coincidently we have flashes that had to be unused in the previous pitches due to trying to conform better to the subdued nature of the location. with this location we didn't have any brand recognition to the general public to worry about. Its not a shop front. there's a degree of freedom to go a bit move verbose. this could also gain attention to our traditional screen. we spent the majority of Wednesday setting up the wiring for lighting. and obtaining switches nowhere in auckland seems to currently have 5v reed switches so we had to use the {forgot name its late atm} switches instead.

This involved more soldering, we have used nearly 3 meters of heat shrink for insulation of our extensive wiring, after starting of the project semi cautious that I'd screw something up during the soldering, its now become an autopilot action.


The system was built to be modular audio jacks were used  for geneeral connections cat5 for long extendable joins these common conectors are useful since they are easy to source and you can easily assemble/dissasembleehole parts of the circuit for transport etc. and in the case of the camera remote port it turns a propietry cable into a more accessable format (sterio 3.5mm in this case)


The Arduino was a a key element of the project it does all the heavy lifting so to speak chicking input and controlling triggerin in sequence
the majority of parts are mounted inside a pelican case a very large main one to hold a 17 inch laptop arduino phone and pcb's with reed switches on them. the other smaller pelican case had a hole drilled in the front to allow the mounting of a camera with lens protruding. and the little pressure equalising bung removed.
We widened the hole by manualy drilling (twisting like a one rpm drill, we resorted to this method due to the desired drill bit was too big for the drills. it worked suprisingly effective but it left small surface cuts on my thumb.
the benifit of using cases for the capture end was this,  under our original concept it involved inserting into the middle of a space it needed to be safe and secure from damage and stealing.

revised diagram

 

This is the refined circuit diagram. a slight modification from the previous incarnation. including the work around of adding a second laptop. and the addition of the reed switch pcb.

refinement

Zak's Java GUI program was running but was still getting a Java heap error. Zak seeked help from Seth who sent a amended code which still struck the error, and we had to plead for rescue. taking around one hour twenty late at night (which we are soooo grateful for) to work out the flaw in the program. replacing a null with a this (in reference to which class it was affecting) although a simple modification the attempts to work out what was the matter introduced  refinements. most notably the ability for it to have a buffer for it to load the image as it becomes ready this stops incomplete loading and the requirement for an initial photo (otherwise the program previously crashed)

Today back to the solder with a upgrading for ruggedness of our circuit, the breadboard was swapped out for a simple rowed PCB this allows for more clean solid connections. now that we have lost the usb through the cat5 and opened up 4 lanes for re-use we added another earth pin for the flash to correct the issue we had with triggering the camera and the flash due to the circuit. we also added a 3.5mm stereo audio jack, unfortunately this managed to screw round with the analog read out into the Arduino so a skirmish was started to resole this issue with the ditching of the stereo jack being the only outcome. Zak managing to make something I'd touched with a soldering iron making it go haywire was one of the signatures of the sound building project I didn't suspect would follow us on our collaboration but hey it could be worse.

We also refined the arrangement of the gear, we walked along K road to find a canvas shop that sold industrial Velcro. instead of flimsy hooks, the hooks look like some sort of fireplace tool 2 directions of velocilraptor claws on each stem. I sheepishly thought we were getting industrial Velcro so we could suspend  the laptops under tables not for epic overkill for the circuit boards.

 

when the Arduino dosen't have anything plugged into the analog input it fluctuates between low and high voltage giving a readout including 0 and 1024 when the cellphone is put in the circuit it gives an input like this the text message received increases the voltage between the two probes since the cellphone still thinks it's powering the vibrate motor. the below is out serial out which is what is received by the laptop for debugging.

0
18
0
5
10
Message Recieved, Count is 2
Auto Focus Finished
Shutter Finished
flash start
flash end
336
0
16
8

The other methods of debugging are using a potentiometer, jumping points with pinned cables, listening to the circuit board to hear if the the the reed switches are going, and the old unplug it, plug it back in. after much refinement the most finicky part of our circuit is the cellphone and the join between the ecat5 wires. here's a time-lapse of the end part of this evenings decent thrash at testing and refining.

The project is nearing into its final stages the hardware and software are at a state which would be comfortable to show it off. we just need to go get permission to use a space  with the plethora of cafes and restaurants in Vulcan lane this should be easy. and the modification of a pelican case to add a glorious camera hole on the front. the only disappointment is the lack of me taking pictures of our progress mostly due to the majority of the time the cameras rigged up for testing. debugging, refinements or out of battery.

acquiring building conjoining and debuggery.

On Tuesday we went on a journey to acquire parts to interconnect our elements, The plan was to make the system as modular as possible. the N3 connector used for the camera shutter and autofocus got augmented with 3.5mm audio jack.

We attempted to run usb through cat5 but due to usb being a feeble standard it doesn't work.

the other 4 lanes were used as  autofocus, shutter, flash trigger and a earth. the earth is required due to all these run as switches all 3 share the same earth for convenience. and require a reed switch to work with the Arduino.

We spent the whole of Tuesday soldering, heat shrinking, constructing, and augmenting cat5

whilst I was augmenting the camera trigger with a male 3.5mm plug and a female on the N3 end, Zak discovered cat5 is immune to solder, to overcome this the wires were looped and the solder was used to tin the normal wire and to try and encase the cat5 to get a firm grip.

a Hot-shoe for my radio trigger

On to the fun part of the project, problem solving. "quirks"

The Tuesday late arvo basic testing of the cable system. the four control lines worked without a hitch.

 the usb line was being temperamental it was powering but unable to transfer data.

Wednesday was our first attempt at sticking all the pegs in the holes:

The discovery that a converter is require to transfer usb via cat5  threw us back into a solution brainstorm unfortunately the only means of wireless transfer is to use a second computer networked with a shared folder (ugly solution but the only viable). one computer at the camera receiving images from the camera the other at the screen running the GUI.

we also had the first time that the arduino triggered the flash,

the only flaw discovered that when the flash trigger is on the hot-shoe and plugged into the cameras pc sync point. causing a flash and then a photo with flash

upon plotting the combinations of wires there was a discrepancy from the original intended. the purpose of the flash trigger is to do maintenance on the flashes and receivers, the receivers are designed to go into sleep after an hour (this can be remedied by just triggering the camera if a photo hasn't been taken in an hour. ( say like 58 minutes for safety)

the autofocus trigger timing needs to be fine tuned but this should be easy to configure.

it also lead in the most ceremonious of the milestones the first camera shot triggered by cellphone!

It's a satisfying feeling seeing all the little bits actually come together, and work as it was intended.

photo courtesy of Philip

circuit diagram general thoughts

This is how the current proposed circuit is. just add reed switches. Tomorrows the first test at sticking all the elements together. after that we need to get permission for a space and do the coding, and present in 1 and a half weeks. which should be an attainable target.

The Arduino code will be checking for TXT messages. controlling the camera (auto focus and shutter)to take the picture and making sure the lighting doesn't go into standby by pinging it infrequently (the time-out on the receivers is 1 hour).

Once a picture is taken by the camera it gets transferred via USB, the camera will be shooting tethered using eos utility (just due to how canon doesn't let the card mound as a disk.) which will dump the photo into a folder. which will be trawled by our UI program which will run on the laptop. and outputted to the screen.

The use of cat5 wiring was chosen due to its fairly standard and gives us 8 lanes to use, (usb taking four, one for camera trigger, one for auto focus, one for radio trigger maintenance , and a shared  ground). a completely wireless system is technically possible but the two compact methods are financially out of reach for this project (the wifi grip for 5dmkii) or restricted due to non ce certification (eye-fi). and would be only useful if we scaled the project further later on adding more cameras.

We have gone for a slight fundamental shift instead of having a table we are focusing back to a more communal screen. this allows for a more exhibitionist vibe, and encourages a narcissistic focus. cos hell people go out to be seen and to see. if they didn't they would just be sitting at home. it would be cool to document the results through flickr/facebook/web2.0visualADDorgyofthemoment, but this depends on the feel of the place and the managements willingness.

development

Our development has been fun so far, we have been playing high speed problem solving and testing of individual elements Tuesday a whole day was spent developing methods of overcoming the message limit on our modified phones, using audio as input into the aurduino to detect when the iphone message tone went. but the only way this was possible was to play music so we created a continuous tone that was easier to distinguish against but this was to inaccurate for implementation, we also tried a vibration sensor to sense the phone vibrating when a message is received this would have to be mounted very carefully inside something with limited influence from the forces applied to the table,

Zak and I work quite well as a group, and had a eirre moment, thinking of a possible solution to the problem at the same time.

In the end Zak got one of the phones we procured from James stash and that's being modified.and Judit  gave us another one, that should allow for two different input types.

We worked out how to make the system wireless (which I still going to set up since it allows for the ability to use flash), but due to the lack of being able to transfer images (within our budget) we are going to need to use a wired connection anyway, using a cat 5 wire that has 8 threads we can transfer usb through 4 and that leaves 4 remaining so we can just send the camera commands down the line as-well, 2 wires is the minimum for the camera trigger if we have 3 we can set up auto focus.

 On Wednesday Zak and I went up to the 3d lab to modify the cellphones to be used as triggers we had to add wires from the jump points previously used for the vibration motors. it had reminnants back to the keyboard hack project trying to solder onto a un prepared circuit board. Zak has a cool butane powered soldering iron.

finding a direction.

Zak and I teamed up.
the events so far

My Arduino came the day the day of hand in for the Java programing so it was a whoa someone random sent me a package moment, Arduino is something that I've wanted to play with since Leah Buechley (she designed the lilypad variation of arduino) visited AUT and gave us a lecture, I've started learning the basics which which is easy so far. I got the normal Arduino Duemilanove as its the board with the usb connector on it and it has pin holders.  I still want to make a lilypad embedded sewn piece of clothing.... maybe during the break.

we went on a exploration to find screens, and found several potential locations.

and got steadfast on two ideas.

The first: A photo booth like thing in the front window of a camera shop, this allows people to take photos of themselves, and others by txting a number. it needs to be visible, and simple to interact if it takes to long the potential user will lose interest

The second a table that is a socio node point. when people go to a eating/drinking establishment its a space to be seen and to see others, this is more focused on a captive audience. this one has the most possibility's for development of content.interface, user experience.

as it currently stands we are just waiting for the approval to go ahead.