construction phase

The alpha 1 build was soldered up and was a bundled mess with individual wires comming from the lcd. also the breadboard was not secured putting the stress on the solder joints to the arduino pin.

Refinements in alpha  2

Cut down a ribbion cable. down to 20 rows for size reasoning, there are only 16 pins on the lcd but by having the extra 4 it provides extra width to reach the outter pins more easily also provides some redundancy in case of faliure of a lane. the awesome part about ribbion cable is its flat and can be folded into shapes

To solve the issue of the intermidary pcb between the arduino and the elements i have ordered a arduino protosheild which is a pcb with the pin headders lined up to slot into the arduino, this will be a project that will likely be a basis for repeated useage. and it will be nice to just have to plug it in and go. without the frailty of a bread board and jumper pins....

The case is the packaging a 2nd gen ipod nano came in.it fits nicely a arduino and a 9v battery on end.

camera timer controler

I semi need a timer remote, but woundn't use one enough to justify puchasing one. all my EOS cameras lack a abilty to take a picture longer than 30 seconds without human manualy doing it


User Interface:
the UI will consist of a Basic 16x2 Character LCD - White on Black 5V
this wil be the first time using this, it takes up 11 of the pins on the arduino. It is able to display characters and numbers, and will allow the viewer to understand whats going on. this will be my main focus on the project due to the learning required and the excess of code to run it.
buttons will consist of a raise and decrease time. maybe a lcd backlight on of trigger and a on off switch. 
likely it will mount onto the hotshoe of the camera


Simple 5 volt spst DIL Reed Relay to trigger the shutter mechanisim linked to a sterio male cable (with af pin unutilised do to it being unessary). plugged onto my female sterio 3.5mm jack -> canon N3 connector


milestones.

/1/     "hello world" acheived with arduino intefacing the screen.
/2/     work out how to update the screen within the program.
/3/     working breadboard build of design.
/4/     function complete version of program
/5/     build contained unit.