kitecamera

I finally succeeded!!!! see the results!

proposal

my next project will be the kitecamera. i want to put a small digital camera in a kite and shoot pictures from the air...
until now the project was severly hindered by the absence of a low budget & wide range radio transmitter & receiver. this weekend i had succes!
in a shop for home appliences i found a remote doorbel! it was only 13$ and had a range of 100m!
now i only have to rework the doorbel and camera to create a golden pair!!!
the parts so far:

Prototype I (19/01/02)

First I needed to connect my digital camera to the outside world. I simple applied a cable in to the camera (using a hot needle to melt a hole).
Then I soldered the different wires in the cable (6-wire telephone cable) to the on/off button, shoot-button and battery power supply. I didn't replace the orignal buttons, just put to wires on the back of the switches.
The next step was making an interface between the doorbel and the camera. I used a output of one of the chips of the doorbel. The output was 0V in standby conditions. Upon pushing the doorbel the output become a high frequency sine wave of approx. 2V. When I tried to use this signal with a bipolar transistor the signal broke down (2V->0V).
Subsequently I used a n-FET transistor (input resistance is very high!). This worked, however the relais was jittering in the same frequency as the signal. I used a Elco (capacitor) to flatten the signal. This worked also!
To make a picture I first needed to push the on-button, and then the shoot button. I made a combination with two relais and a capacitor to translate the output of the doorbel into 2 make contacts which fire after each other.
It all worked but..... The timing of pushing the buttons on the right moment was a bitch. Sometimes the camera took no photo, sometimes 3, and sometimes the camera went into menu mode (effectivly blocking everything).
....[sigh]

Prototype II (20/01/02)

When I was fooling around with the camera I noticed that when I pushed the shoot button continiously it didn't auto-shutdown (the auto shutdown was the reason I had to push the on-button). This gave me an idea!
I changed the wiring in a way that the shoot-button was always on except when you pushed the doorbell! In this way I could loose the on-button relais and the timing issue was gone! Succes at last!
I build the whole thing in a small box (the doorbell box).
I first tested it indoor (picture was taken by the kitecam!!!!):

The next step was putting it in my kite:
When I wanted to test the range, it turned out that (from the numerous testing) the battery of the transmitter was dead. The range was only 5m... I used a non-portable power supply to check, and indeed it was due to the battery...
So 5m was too short to test it in flight.... next week more luck!
To be continued.....

Succes!! (27/01/02)

This weekend I took the first pictures with correct battery & kite etc...
IT WORKED!!!! It was really cool. As you can see below the wind was rather fierce. The camera was bouncing around in the kite so I took a lot of relativly foolish pictures. You can also see on some pictures that the kite went too fast!!
It was fun!