To activate the camera in our water drop photography, my dad and I are going to use an infrared shutter release that will tell the camera to take a picture. We wired the infrared shutter release up to the Raspberry Pi, and when we run the program we made in Python, the camera takes a picture! The picture above is part of the circuit we made to control the camera. We used the program we made to take the picture above.

The circuit we made consists of a few different parts. The T-shaped blue thing in the picture above is called the Raspberry Cobbler. It connects the circuit to the Raspberry Pi. The yellow wire is connecting the output pin of the Raspberry Pi to a resistor. The resistor causes less current to flow. Without a resistor, too much current would flow causing the circuit to blow. The resistor is connected to the “base” of an NPN transistor, the black thing with three legs. The emitter of the transistor is connected to ground by the purple wire and the black wire, and the dark green wire connects it to the other part of the circuit(in the picture below).

The dark green wire towards the top of the picture below is the same wire you saw in the picture at the top of the page. The two black wires you can see are connected to the infrared shutter release. Inside the reed relay(the blue thing) is a switch. When I run the program, the circuit gets power and the switch closes. This powers the infrared shutter release and tells the camera to take a picture. The orange, brown, and yellow wires connect the parts together so the electricity can flow. The little black cylinder is called a diode, and it’s there for safety reasons. Without the diode, the reed relay could damage the circuit.

I’m so happy we finally got this working! Check back soon for more updates on our progress!