[justDIY]

I'm headed out to the desert next week, and one of my goals is to photograph a time lapse of the night sky. For whatever reason, Hoya chose not to bless us with a built in interval timer on the K-x, nor a wired remote port. They did give us a single shot infrared remote, and that was enough.

Reverse engineering their remote protocol, I programmed a little chip to pretend it's a "Remote F" and trigger the shutter remotely. A single button programs in any interval from 1/2 second to 59 seconds. On two AA batteries, I expect the timer to have a runtime of weeks, but that's untested as of yet.

I have a more detailed write-up here:
justDIY Project Log Pentax IR Interval Timer

and this is the finished project:


So far I've tested it out twice, first for 30 min and ~90 exposures, the second for 7 hours and 800+ exposures ... this video is from the short test:

You Tube

You Tube

Any thoughts or feedback?

[S0l]

Cool! Thanks for sharing!

[gflauti]

Great job!

[Nasus]

Nice work!
(But shame on Pentax for building cameras without a wired remote port. Saving 20ct but making lots of pictures impossible or at least quite tricky)

[Jodokast96]

Fabricate a nifty little case to hold everything and start selling them already.

[RonHendriks1966]

Great way to avoid the max number off pictures to take with the camera.

[jimr-pdx]

What a marvel - thank you for the DIY project. I'll put it high on my list of about 700 projects - hey, I'm talking top-three for this!

[BillM]

Cool J,like those little 8 pin micros too.Kind of surprised at how accurate on die
osc. is on those things.Was able to bit-bang 2400 baud serial port that worked
flawlessly.

For what its worth,seen a chap use a 555 to 'wake up' pic after it entered sleep mode.
He was collecting data from temperature sensor in a cave.Was able to extend
battery life to months in that manner.