Hack Your Camera to Add Time-Lapse Functionality

November 25th, 2010 by: Chris B.

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Do you ever wish that your point-and-shoot camera had a few more high-end features?

For most people a simple point-and-shoot camera is perfect. They’re small, take good pictures and can be relatively inexpensive. Unfortunately, there are some things that a lot of them just can’t do. If you only want a single extra feature, such as the ability to do time-lapse photography, don’t spend the extra money on a fancy DSLR. Instead, why not destroy your current camera in the attempt to add this feature?

Alright, so if you’ve got a bit of modding experience, you should be able to pull this off without a hitch. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you might want to think twice about tearing open your camera. This Instructables guide tells you everything you need to know about adding a microcontroller to a Rollei brand camera. It appears to be surprisingly simple to complete, and provides good results. Essentially what it does is powers on the camera, takes a picture, then turns off the camera. After a pre-determined amount of time, it will repeat the process. All you have to do now is set it up and wait a few hours for the results (example shown below).

[via HackADay]