Hacking your old digital camera just got easier! Last week we received 250 printed circuit boards – built to connect your digital camera to a sound sensor and an intervalometer (see our camera hack post for more details).

You can see a step-by-step GIF animation of the process here: trigger.gif (2.21MB)

We’ve packaged these custom-made Arduino-based boards boards together with the necessary parts so that you can assemble your own hacked digi-cam and take photos from brand new perspectives.

Since the hacked cameras are self-contained, they can be placed in virtually any location and can take shots from almost any angle – hands-free. So far, working with students at our Digital Summer Camp, we’ve prototyped bicycle cams, skateboard cams, hamster-ball cams, spray-paint cams, RC-cams, tree-cams – and more!

Want one? Here’s our first of a series of weekly photo challenges. We’ll pick some of our favourites submisions – they’ll be posted here and the artists will receive a FREE Camera Trigger Kit. Because this is our first photo challenge, we’re giving away 10 FREE KITS!

Instructions:

1) Take a photograph from a unique perspective. From beneath a car, on top of a bridge, underwater, in your sock drawer – we want to see your world from a new angle.

2) Upload the photo to Flickr and tag it with ‘glocalproject’ and ‘photochallenge’.

If your image is selected, we’ll mail you a camera kit right away. We’ll be giving all of our boards away over the next few months – so stay tuned!

UPDATE: Glocal Camera Trigger Boards are here! And, we’re giving them away for FREE! 

Here’s a preliminary taste of one of the things we’ve been working on: the Glocal Camera trigger. This Arduino-based hack lets you take pictures by triggering your camera’s shutter on a time delay (every ten seconds, every 20, every ten minutes…), or by plain old sound: you make a noise and the camera takes a picture. We’ve been perfecting it and it is very sensitive- anything from a whisper to a loud sound will make it trigger the camera.

Our intention behind this is to come up with ways that the camera can be triggered from positions that are not connected to the body. If we aren’t holding the camera, imagine what kind of perspectives can be captured, and what unique situations might be documented.

We’ve asked our artist friend, Daniel Joliffe if he could come up with a circuit board design for this, one that makes for easy assembly and hacking. We’ll post that in a few weeks time, but for now, here is a zip file with the schematic in PDF and Eagle CAD formats, and the Arduino code too. And to whet your appetite for camera hacking, here are a few pictures of the first prototype.. (oh, and it fits in an Altoids tin).

glocal_camera_trigger_june26_08.zip (96k)