weiss-d / shutterdog

Film camera shutter chronograph made with Arduino.

📷 Shutterdog

Film camera shutter chronograph made with Arduino Nano.

🔏 This repo in not maintained. However, feel free to ask any questions through the issues, or fork it and make a better version by yourself.

The project was inspired by this article about measuring shutter speed of vintage Kiev-3 camera. Its author uses a laser, a phototransistor and an oscilloscope to manually measure the time interval of the shutter. You can see pictures of the entire pfocess and of measuring device itself.

I chose to use the BPW34 photodiode instead, the fastest I could find on the local market. And then I added LM393P comparator to make thing more digestible for Arduino. The final scheme looks like this:

The code returns measuring results in milliseconds. You will need eRCaGuy_Timer2_Counter library to run it. Get it here. It's recommended to repeat the measurement on each shutter speed at least three times. Finally it's convenient to put results in a table like this:

Model: Smena-8M
Serial No.: 178060
No.	Symbol	Estimated duration, ms	Average measured duration, ms
1	2	500
2	4	250
3	5	200
4	8	125
5	10	100
6	15	66.7	79
7	25	40
8	30	33.3	43
9	50	20
10	60	16.7	24.5
11	125	8	12.4
12	250	4	4.8
13	500	2
14	1000	1
15	1250	0.8
16	2000	0.5