#lightpainting #process update!

I've got my DSLR hooked up to the Marlin control board in bulb mode (via a small transistor circuit on a breadboard connecting to the camera control socket), so I can open and close the camera shutter with a gcode command. This works really well: I can just concatenate the gcode files for all the frames, start the print, and walk away. I've also added a few lines of code to the firmware so I can leave the shutter open for a constant exposure even if the frames take a different amount of time to draw.

I generated 300 frames for a 10 second animation by adding some time-varying parameters to my isometric landscape code. These take up to a minute and a half to draw so I stopped after half an hour and will be working on a simpler animation that maybe takes 10-20 seconds.

I'm ordering an external power supply for the camera too to not be limited by the battery, but a bigger problem with it is that the mechanical noise of the plotter moving quickly can be quite a nuisance if it's running over night. Maybe one to come back to on dark winter afternoons or when the neighbours are out!

It's obviously a huge time investment for a very short clip that could have been computer-generated in a few seconds but then again I do like shooting long exposure timelapses of the night sky, so it's similar in a way?

#penplotter #lightpainting #photography #timelapse #dslr

1 year ago