Nuts and Volts - February 2009

■ FIGURE 3. The Cam Tim trigger circuit along with the C5000-Zoom remote and battery pack

sends out a trigger signal every few seconds. Of course, this is a very basic circuit and code.

You could also program the PIC to perform other complicated functions including using an external trigger to start the time-lapse using the unused pins from PORTA. Yet another possibility would be to use the interrupt signal when the status of PORTB changes to modify the inter-frame interval. This would prevent the necessity of restarting the circuit after every interval selection.

I built the entire circuit on a RadioShack PCB using the parts given in Table 1, and placed it securely inside a metal container. It is also best to mount the PIC on female headers to simplify the task of reprogramming. You can see some of the time-lapse movies I have taken using Cam Tim at: http://ziggrid.com/Cam Tim/tlapse. The PCB layout is available from: http://ziggrid.com/Cam Tim/pcb. NV