The shutter speed of a camera is an important adjustment in photography: the shutter, together with the aperture, regulates the amount of light that enters the camera. Older cameras (and some newer ones) use mechanical shutters that have degraded over the years, so [Dean Segovis] made a handy shutter speed tester.
The project contains only a few basic components, making it ideal for beginners to explore in depth. The tester is based on a photoresistor that measures the light passing through the camera body from another light source (flash). When the camera shutter is released, the shutter speed is measured and displayed on the OLED screen. The Arduino naturally handles all computing tasks. The entire unit is easily assembled on a breadboard in just a few minutes.
The original project [hiroshootsfilm] made its way to Project Hub, but [Dean] dug a little deeper, did code troubleshooting, and tried out various old film cameras with a breadboard tester. His tests showed that the photoresistor is better at detecting shutter speed when the camera lens is off.
While it’s no wonder these older cameras have issues with mechanical shutters, this little tester will be an invaluable tool when it’s time to start tweaking the shutter mechanism. If this project sparked your interest in photography, be sure to check out Packfilm’s 100 Series Polaroid brain transplant project we covered back in 2011.
Not bad, but maybe a bit overkill? I tested the shutters of old cameras and used a discarded solar cell and scope.
We didn’t even have sights back then. We check on the light grid of the TV screen or the rotation of the fan blades.
In my time, we had to take mind-altering drugs to slow down time and watch it with our own eyes.
luxurious! In my day, we had to repeatedly hit ourselves with rocks in the forehead to change our minds sufficiently.
Do you want to change matter? Bliss! In my day, we had to count the shutter time very, very quickly with our fingers, eating gravel and going uphill in both directions!
Do you have a slide? We can only dream of a hill, but it’s just a hill! Even though our dreams are small, we can’t even imagine seeing a real 35mm camera.
Even this is too much! I tested it by plugging it into my laptop’s microphone and cockily zooming in on the signal!
By the way. I can understand the friendship between hackaday and hackaweek, but here is the whole blog post: http://hackaweek.com/hacks/shutter-speed-tester-with-arduino/
Cool little project. The basic design is simple but effective. I’m sure the same basic principles he uses can be applied to many other problems as well.
For example, I think it will not be difficult to convert it into a non-contact tachometer. The shaft may need solid black and a stripe of white paint. Change the code a little here and there. But I’m sure it will work.
I laugh and think about it here. My entire electronics journey began over 20 years ago with this project in mind. Maybe 25 years later I still haven’t finished the original project. The original rabbit hole leads to other rabbit holes, and there are other rabbit holes among them, and who the hell is this person supporting the Earth.
Just out of old memory, I have to build this project. I don’t know if I have manual blinds! At the time, I was fiddling with a widescreen camera, but I threw all my gear away…
I found this very helpful when we were at the darkroom checking out our donated old cameras. The shutters wear out and the springs get weak, so it’s a good idea to get a feel for the speed or accuracy (or what it really is) before inserting a roll of film. I can make it, put it in a 3D printed case and keep it with the camera for the entire darkroom team.
I would think a simpler approach would be to use an array of LEDs and turn them on one at a time at a predictable rate. By adding a checkmark next to it and assuming you start the sequence when you press the shutter button, essentially counting the amount of light in the image, you get the delay time.
I’ll take it back, I like the design. Though I’m wondering if it can be made to read faster and remapped to keep other things in sync. Perhaps if he could do multiple reads, he could turn into an optical bus bootlegger.
At some point, I started making a shutter speed tester. Use an IR LED and an IR receiver to do this. It worked fine for an SLR focal plane shutter until I got to about 1/1000th of a second and the Arduino analog readout wasn’t fast enough to get meaningful numbers. I too got so caught up in weeds that I never looked further into it… sort of like a shutter that opens slowly and then closes faster – do you start measuring the one that comes out of a small moment of opening? half? Fully open? How do you define any of them? So, for a focal plane shutter on an SLR, the front can be faster or slower than the back covering it, how do you measure that? One LED and one receiver on each end? Maybe you’re just worrying too much about small details, especially when it comes to film at some shutter speed, it probably doesn’t matter as long as the shutter is close enough…
Won’t give accurate results for focal plane shutters for reasons given by Wesley. The shutter doesn’t just “open and close” for a set amount of time. It has two curtains that run through the film. The main curtain moves first, then the rear one. At very low speeds, the film is fully exposed for a given amount of time, but at most speeds there is a variable width moving gap in which the film is exposed sequentially. The width of the gap determines the exposure. The device cannot measure it.
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Post time: Jul-19-2023
