Do-it-yourself projects and technology updates

DIY Lightning Photography

Here is a design for a circuit that will take pictures of lightning. It is basically a light sensor that is amplified and passed through a high pass filter to record fast changes in light, and then attached to a relay that trips the camera.



This seems very similar to my design of the external disposable camera flash. My design uses a microcontroller to do all of the hard work for you. I much prefer to use programming anytime I can to save work on using hardware.

In a nutshell, the photo darlington converts light pulses into electrical pulses, the first LM324 section amplifies the electrical pulses, the second LM324 section is a high pass filter that only passes quick changes (lightning). The third LM324 stage is a comparator that allows only large pulses to pass through, and the 4047 one-shot stretches out the length of the pulses so that they are long enough to drive the relay and trigger the camera.

The 2N3904 drives the reed relay, which in turn triggers the camera’s electronic shutter switch. The VN10KM prevents the circuit from triggering the camera when it is first turned on. The LM324 GND Ref circuit divides the 9V power into two for a 4.5V ground reference. The other op-amp circuits use this reference value.

This is a pretty cool design, that would work for some cool lightning photography. Check out this project here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 5:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.