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This is the next step from bursting water balloons !
I bought a cheap 'dummy camera' with a motion sensor that triggers a small motor to make it look real and scare people .



Then I ripped its guts out ....



cut the wires off the motor and soldered them to a 5v -50volt DC solid state relay ...



And finally tonight I did some preliminary tests to see what factors come into the equation .
First I found out that if I had very low lighting I needed a large object to trigger the sensor .



Then when I dropped the lens cap in front of it I initially thought the bounce on the table was triggering the flash .....



Then I increased the distance available and found that there is quite a delay from the movement till the flash fired which is good - it will make it easier to time something like a water drop .



I found out that the most reliable way to get it to trigger with smaller objects is to have a weak light shining right at the sensor and then have the shadow of the object pass across the opening - this will require some setting up in future but tomorrow morning I pack to go and climb mount Egmont so this project will have to wait a while .... at least I'll have something to think about for a few days !

interesting project! show us more pictures please !!

(12-31-2009 05:12 AM)wrong Wrote: [ -> ]interesting project! show us more pictures please !!

I'm off to climb mount Egmont in a few hours so it'll be a few days before I have something 'decent' to offer

enjoy your trip and have a happy new year!

no worries i'm sure we can wait

Desmond, you always have some interesting projects or experiments going on. Thanks for sharing them with the forum. Have a good climb on Mt. Egmont and best wishes for the new year.

Interesting idea! Thanks for sharing it!

Hopefully I can start getting some decent results soon - my muscles are complaining a bit after yesterday's climb !

That sounds very complicating but very cool. Hope to hear more about it

The flash-triggering system is going to be a bit too complicated since I will need to use slow exposures for it as well . Today I decided to take a new approach to the issue and opened the remote trigger and shaved away the black stuff in the switch area .



With my D50 on 'remote' mode when I have the two wires from the solid state relay pressed against those two scratched-away patches the camera fires when I move ... yeeehaaaaa !

Total change of plans : It was difficult keeping the wires in decent contact with the black stuff so I taped a piece of foil over those contacts to keep them permanently on and removed the battery which said "3v" on it .
I tried something different and removed one of the three 1.5 volt batteries from the power supply of the motion sensor and joined a piece of wire across the gap making it a 3 volt system [ hopefully ] . I totally threw out the [ expensive ] solid state relay and took the wires that used to take a 4.5 volt feed [ now 3 volts ] to the motor and soldered them onto the battery contacts of the remote trigger . Since the switch contacts are permanently 'on' as soon as it gets power [ after the sensor detects movement ] it fires the camera .



I think I have it nailed now for some test shots that no longer require darkness !



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