High-Speed Photography Trigger

Many of you know that I am studying electrical engineering at IUPUI (I'll be done Fall 2013), which probably explains why I haven't posted any blogs since July 9th, 2012! I took an Embedded Systems course (ECE471) this semester. The course is built around students selecting a project and using a PIC microcontroller to implement the project. I am heavily involved in photography so I tried to think of a way to incorporate photography into our course project. The video below describes our project and demonstrates how it works.

If the video made you want to learn more, feel free to look at the report Josh and I wrote for our project. Click HERE to view the pdf. It's very likely  that there are some mistakes in the documentation. Also, the parts list doesn't give a clear picture of how much $$$ we spent on the project. Many components and parts were not available in single quantities so we had to buy more than we actually needed. Also, most of the parts were  purchased at local electronics stores, which resulted in much higher prices. 

Again, I am happy to try an answer any/all questions you have regarding our project.

Here are some final images captured with our system.

Here are some first attempts at photographing a water balloon as it pops. The pictures needed to be snapped a fraction of a second sooner, but not bad for first time!