At the European Maker Faire 2014 in Rome, Emutex were invited to display some demos based on the new Intel® Edison module, a dual core Atom based system-on-module with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. This article gives a brief overview of one of these demos, which was an Intel® Edison controlled Timelapse controller for a DSLR Camera.
The controller consisted of a hardware rail with a motorised dolly on which a camera was mounted, and the movement and camera operation was programmed from a remote application on an iPhone. Everything was contolled by the Edison, which created a Wi-Fi Hotspot for the iPhone to connect into, and controlled the GPIO pins which drove the camera shutter and motor.
Here is a shot from the show, where we were lucky enough to have access to a large screen TV, which was showing some time-lapse videos by David Hunt, an Emutex engineer and designer of the time lapse rail hardware. The videos that were on show at the Maker Faire can be seen on David's website at http://www.davidhunt.ie/gallerys/timelapse/
Software
The back-end software was a node-js based server application, which listened for commands from the remote client app. In turn, this server app could then talk to the GPIO pins on the Edison Arduino board to control the motor on the rail, and trigger the camera to take pictures. This part of the back-end was implemented using wiring-x86, a python library that Emutex have developed to hide the complexity of the GPIO Pin multiplexing behind a very easy-to-use set of functions for GPIO programming on the Intel® Galileo, Inte®l Galileo Gen2, and now Intel® Edison.
The client consisted of an iPhone app, which is basically simple screen where the three necessary parameters for the time lapse could be entered.
- The number of seconds to pulse the motor between shots.
- The number of seconds to delay after taking a picture.
- The number of pictures.
The configuration screen allows the back-end ip address of the Edison Camera controller.
Hardware
At the core of the system was an Intel® Edison on an Arduino baseboard with a custom Arduino shield which was designed to driver DC motors and also trigger a DSLR camera. With suitable cables, a connection can be made between the shield and the camera, and between the shield and the motor, so the Edison can then drive them via software.
Also shown in the image above is the WiFi pigtail connecting into the on-board Wi-Fi, which allows connection of a larger WiFi whip antenna. The Edison has built-in Wi-Fi, so this makes wireless based projects very easy.
