Fun To Play With

tsiya

Frustrated with long range results, I dissected a toy RC car, removed the electronics,and came up with a 27MHz long range remote. All it does is push the button, but I am getting macros of live, wild birds. Few details to work out, but so far it looks good, no more sitting in cramped, stuffy blinds or messing with focus and exposure details with heavy glass. I can shoot from up to 100 feet from the camera. Birds are easy, just provide a free lunch, and aim at it. Not being able to fine tune for each shot, I am working out settings to keep things in a range that Paint Shop Pro can average out. I know this has been done before, but not for $22.95. I just hope the neighborhood Kids don't find out why their RC toys go bonkers every so often.

wxwax

Excellent idea. Could you give more details? And show some piccies?

tsiya

Hope a pic is worth a thousand words!

wxwax wrote:

Excellent idea. Could you give more details? And show some piccies?

Base is 1/8" acrylic window glazing. Green upright is an Exacto hobby clamp I had laying around, lots of other ways it could be done. Orange rod is a chunk of an aluminum arrow shaft, again, whatever You have that works. You can't use the very basic RC toys, have to get something marked as "full function" that has a steering servo. You will find a toy car or boat is cheaper than buying separate radio gear. The transmitter will have 2 wires coming in, splice them to the outputs on a little battery box You can get at radio shack. My car was made to run on 6V, 4 AA NiMh batts do the job. Two heavy wires coming out of reciever will be the supply to the motor, 2 lighter ones to the steering servo. Use these. You can clip the motor wires off close to the circuit board, unless You might want to put it all back in the car later. The battery holder and reciever both fit in the clear case, part of a cigar display, separated by a piece of plastic foam
BIG CONCERN! Only way I can see to get into trouble is to allow too much force to be applied to Your camera. I adjust the linkage to make sure the pressure stops just as the camera fires. Later version will have an elastic link just in case.
There is no halfway stop, but My Olys go through the whole focus and exposure drill with a full depression of the button, halfway is just to compose and view before shooting. If You need a 2 stage set up, there are proportional servos, but I suspect a single stage will work in a lot of cases.
Could have eliminated the lever system, but was not sure the servo would fire without some leverage advantage. Next project will mount the servo underneath, with a rod running through a tube, bent at the end to pull down on the button. Gonna use brass, hard soldered joints, make it all purty. I hope the pic is self explanatory.

wxwax

So you pick a spot, set the camera up, retreat, use binoculars to see when something's in range, then use the remote to take a pic?

tsiya

Don't need the binocs

wxwax wrote:

So you pick a spot, set the camera up, retreat, use binoculars to see when something's in range, then use the remote to take a pic?

Birds are suckers for free lunch. I move around the yard enough that the locals are not that afraid of Me, but to get what I want I need the glass almost touching feathers. Problem is getting them when they are still, focus and exposure is working out, I can read the bar code on the bottom of one of My feeders, but get a lot of motion blurred birds. They outrun the shutter.Can't do anything about that but keep shooting. If I were in a different situation I would put a flag of some kind at the focal point and use that to judge when to shoot. It is a system with limits, but it is proving out to be useful. Up to now My interest has been shore and sea birds, and bigger birds are easier to photograph, they are less rapid in motion. Little birds are a different thing altogether. They seem to vibrate at high frequency all the time. As I said, it is a fun idea to play with. I was gonna post some shots telling everyone I had found the hottest teleconvertor in the world, but decided to just put it out and see if it would help anyone out. Anyone want to see sample shots get with Me at rifleman@aug.com

It would be a big help to get ideas how to make it work better.

wxwax

That's very cool, man. Are you sure you don't want to post any pics here? I'm positive people would really like to see them.

DoctorIt

tsiya wrote:

Base is 1/8" acrylic window glazing. Green upright is an Exacto hobby clamp I had laying around, lots of other ways it could be done. Orange rod is a chunk of an aluminum arrow shaft, again, whatever You have that works. You can't use the very basic RC toys, have to get something marked as "full function" that has a steering servo. You will find a toy car or boat is cheaper than buying separate radio gear. The transmitter will have 2 wires coming in, splice them to the outputs on a little battery box You can get at radio shack. My car was made to run on 6V, 4 AA NiMh batts do the job. Two heavy wires coming out of reciever will be the supply to the motor, 2 lighter ones to the steering servo. Use these. You can clip the motor wires off close to the circuit board, unless You might want to put it all back in the car later. The battery holder and reciever both fit in the clear case, part of a cigar display, separated by a piece of plastic foam
BIG CONCERN! Only way I can see to get into trouble is to allow too much force to be applied to Your camera. I adjust the linkage to make sure the pressure stops just as the camera fires. Later version will have an elastic link just in case.
There is no halfway stop, but My Olys go through the whole focus and exposure drill with a full depression of the button, halfway is just to compose and view before shooting. If You need a 2 stage set up, there are proportional servos, but I suspect a single stage will work in a lot of cases.
Could have eliminated the lever system, but was not sure the servo would fire without some leverage advantage. Next project will mount the servo underneath, with a rod running through a tube, bent at the end to pull down on the button. Gonna use brass, hard soldered joints, make it all purty. I hope the pic is self explanatory.

Now that is a handyman's special! Nice work!

tsiya

Hesitant To Use The Bosses Space,but Since You Ask

wxwax wrote:

That's very cool, man. Are you sure you don't want to post any pics here? I'm positive people would really like to see them.[/Q
Tiny bit of blur, but, still a shot I could not get otherwise. Set up yesterday, started raining, heading out to try again.

tsiya

Relative Motion Or Something

tsiya wrote:

wxwax wrote:

That's very cool, man. Are you sure you don't want to post any pics here? I'm positive people would really like to see them.[/Q
Tiny bit of blur, but, still a shot I could not get otherwise. Set up yesterday, started raining, heading out to try again.

May help to stabilize the feeder, it swings when the birds land, and at the same time, they continue to move in various ways. This is sharper, would have preferred birds other aspect.

tsiya

Lesson Learned This Morning
If You have 4 bird feeders, 75% of the time they will go to the wrong one, and, flash only bothers them the first time, they come right back. This is getting close to what I want. OlyC4000Z, with the 2Xaccessory lens. Not zoomed out much, cropped some vignetting. YAAAHOOO.

GREAPER

Just some thoughts on birds and your method. It seems pretty cool and has the potential for some great stuff.

If you are photographing the birds in an attempt to get great bird photos you might want to find a perch close to the feeders that the birds use a lot instead of getting the feeder in the shot. Most people are more pleased with an animal shot if the animal is in it's natural environment. Often birds will repeatedly approach a feeder and land on the same branch both comming and going giving many opportunities without the feeder in the shot.

This might also give the opportunty for sharper shots because the branch would be more stable than a hanging feeder.

since you are not looking through the veiwfinder your only hope of a nice pose or composition is the fire away whenever there is a bird within your target zone and sort the weak shots out later.

Expect a LOT of weak shots. I am looking throught the veiwfinder and have a dslr with no shutter lag and still throw away 95 percent of what I get at least.

Examples of what I have taken can be found here.

I ahve literal thrown away hundreds of bad shots to get these and I am not all that happy with all of them.

Patience....

tsiya

10-4 On That!

GREAPER wrote:

Just some thoughts on birds and your method. It seems pretty cool and has the potential for some great stuff.

If you are photographing the birds in an attempt to get great bird photos you might want to find a perch close to the feeders that the birds use a lot instead of getting the feeder in the shot. Most people are more pleased with an animal shot if the animal is in it's natural environment. Often birds will repeatedly approach a feeder and land on the same branch both comming and going giving many opportunities without the feeder in the shot.

{ Reply starts here}I run around with a wallet full of SM cards for the OlyC4000 just for that reason, C2500L uses both SM and CF, has more memory, but most stuff I capture never gets to PSP. Last 3 days has been test run time, time to get out of the yard with it, I wouldn't want to frame anything with a feeder in it either. I see this as an inexpensive alternative to more lenses, for Me, more cameras, mine already carry all the glass I can hang on them, and retirement income is not elastic. Buy stock in Energizer, the way I am adding NIMHs to My collection, You will do well! Thanks for the kind words!

wxwax

tsiya, that's very cool, and I can sure see the potential for fun. A big to your creativity and engineering!

darryl

Ok, first off, great photos! But that's a hardcore physical hack involving way too much machining of plexiglass and brass fittings for my tastes. :}

I wonder, since you had a remote mechanism that could trigger servos, why not just have them trigger relays? You could put those into a small remote receiver which could be plugged directly into the Canon's 2.5mm (submini) cable release socket. This page has all of those specs:

http://www.chantalcurrid.com/remoteControl.htm

Just trying to help you (or the rest of us) find a somewhat more compact solution. ;}

--Darryl