Camera Synchronisation

And now, the whole adventure that was porting the CHDK comes to this, taking synchronised images from multiple cameras at once. But it's still not that simple!

First we need some more hardware that will trigger the cameras:

Build after schematics on CHDK wiki, the voltage trigger works.

But now it needs to be tested with two cameras, to see if the image acquisition is synchronised, so we need one more piece of hardware:

A true scrap heap project composed of an unused electric motor from a model plane, some spare electronic elements, a CD holder from an ancient MacBook's CD drive and a brand new DVD which was drilled trough so a LED and a battery was mounted on it.

With this the synchronisation wheel came to be. By using the known exposure values on the camera and tracing the light trail made by the LED, the rotational speed was calculated to about 10.36Hz.

Now with this information the synchronisation between the cameras can be calculated:

Taking the same picture with both cameras at the same time with the trigger, the angles from the start and en of the light trail can be measured and compared.

So far, the exposure time was the same and worst calculated delay between the cameras was 0.3ms. Not bad, but this may still vary a bit, since so far it has only been tested with few pictures and on one set of settings.