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Spring has sprung and at school my daughter is learning about baby animals and blossoming trees and all that. So I thought it would be a nice little project for her if we were to get a small fish tank, fill it with soil and plant some seeds tight up against the glass so she can see them grow.
Naturally, things escalated and I thought if we are going to this effort why not also photograph it and see if we can make a time lapse, and having not done this before I thought it might be worth recording the process here.
First up was sorting out a camera. I don't want to use mine, a Fuji X-T3 as I don't want it unavailable for other things. The only other camera I have that has been sitting unused at the back of a cupboard for a few years is an Olympus XZ-10 compact, if I can get that to work then great!
First issue is controlling the shot intervals, which after a bit of research online it seems 10 minute intervals should be about right. Being a fairly basic compact, this feature is not native to the camera, but I was able to find out that it can be used with an intervalometer, so thanks to ebay I got myself this.
The next issue to solve is powering the camera. It may need to be left running for 3-4 weeks at a time depending on what seeds we decide to grow so battery power clearly isn't going to cut it. The camera will run and charge while being powered via the usb port, but this is already being used by the intervalometer. Olympus never made a mains adapter for this camera so I thought to make one, but one thing I wasn't confident about was cutting up a lithium battery to convert to a dummy battery, but fortunately these were available from aliexpress.
So with that, all that was left was to sort out the power supply which actually took two attempts.
The battery is rated at 3.7V, which I assumed would be voltage at full charge and that the camera would continue to operate at lower voltages up to a point. I built a power supply using a 240V AC to 3.3V DC module but the camera failed to power on.
So I measured the battery voltage when fully charged and again when depleted, it turns out that at full charge the battery sits at 4.3V and the camera shuts down when it reaches 3.7V, bugger!.
So a power supply around 4.3V would be ideal, but I could not find a module around this rating, the next one up I could find was 5V. As the camera will charge and run off of a USB connection which is 5V I guessed this would be fine. So here is the final power supply.
Along with a fly lead to connect the dummy battery to the power supply, I checked that I was seeing the correct voltage, and checking that I hadn't screwed up the polarity before trying it on the camera!
All looks OK, so final test, the dummy battery in the camera and all seems to be working. Whoopee!
That's probably the most challenging part of the project out of the way. Left to do is
Naturally, things escalated and I thought if we are going to this effort why not also photograph it and see if we can make a time lapse, and having not done this before I thought it might be worth recording the process here.
First up was sorting out a camera. I don't want to use mine, a Fuji X-T3 as I don't want it unavailable for other things. The only other camera I have that has been sitting unused at the back of a cupboard for a few years is an Olympus XZ-10 compact, if I can get that to work then great!
First issue is controlling the shot intervals, which after a bit of research online it seems 10 minute intervals should be about right. Being a fairly basic compact, this feature is not native to the camera, but I was able to find out that it can be used with an intervalometer, so thanks to ebay I got myself this.
The next issue to solve is powering the camera. It may need to be left running for 3-4 weeks at a time depending on what seeds we decide to grow so battery power clearly isn't going to cut it. The camera will run and charge while being powered via the usb port, but this is already being used by the intervalometer. Olympus never made a mains adapter for this camera so I thought to make one, but one thing I wasn't confident about was cutting up a lithium battery to convert to a dummy battery, but fortunately these were available from aliexpress.
So with that, all that was left was to sort out the power supply which actually took two attempts.
The battery is rated at 3.7V, which I assumed would be voltage at full charge and that the camera would continue to operate at lower voltages up to a point. I built a power supply using a 240V AC to 3.3V DC module but the camera failed to power on.
So I measured the battery voltage when fully charged and again when depleted, it turns out that at full charge the battery sits at 4.3V and the camera shuts down when it reaches 3.7V, bugger!.
So a power supply around 4.3V would be ideal, but I could not find a module around this rating, the next one up I could find was 5V. As the camera will charge and run off of a USB connection which is 5V I guessed this would be fine. So here is the final power supply.
Along with a fly lead to connect the dummy battery to the power supply, I checked that I was seeing the correct voltage, and checking that I hadn't screwed up the polarity before trying it on the camera!
All looks OK, so final test, the dummy battery in the camera and all seems to be working. Whoopee!
That's probably the most challenging part of the project out of the way. Left to do is
- Knock up a set-up to mount the fish tank and camera.
- Sort out lighting.
- Add a mains socket in my loft as this is where I intend to place it when finished.
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