Using a laser to trigger a camera setup

[Foto-guy]

Hi,

My wife is an equestrian photographer and I am her techie hubby. Not so techie that I ever got into lasers, but love learning, but would rather defer to experts first.

I am trying to put together a system which will activate a camera on a tripod. The camera needs to be at least 15m away from the jump so as not to distract horse or rider nor be run over if horse decides to run out from the jump.

I have tried only one "off the shelf" product that comes with an IR transmitter (power unknown) and can also be red or green laser activated. I have tried the included IR, a 650nm 5mw red, and lastly a green 532nm 120mw.

None worked consistently, especially in bright light outdoors and at that range of 15+m.

I did 3D print a hood for the receiver, which helped slightly, but not enough for consistent use.

The other issue is lining up the laser at that range. I used a black sheet of thin plastic and was able to do pretty well aligning.

As I am typing this, a thought popped in my head, maybe drilling a hole in the plastic and aligning the laser through that hole to the sensor might cut out excess sensor flooding....

Not knowing lasers or receivers very well I am struggling to get a handle on this.

If I got the transmit and receive down, I have a multitude of RPis that I can program for all the rest of the required actions. I just need to get a consistently triggered signal to work from.

Suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[kecked]

Ok question. Are you trying to setup a tripwire for the camera or just a remote. If a remote just buy a wifi version. It’s made for most cameras. Now a tripwire is different because you need something wider. The odds of the horse touching the space of a laser are really small. It would be better to set up something like a garage door detector or a set of say four around the jump. Now when the beam is broken it can trigger the wifi trigger. No lasers. All safe. Cheap. Realizable. So the way you setup the multiple triggers is with an OR gate. Set them up for the number of inputs you need. If any is triggered then a logic high is created for the wifi trigger. Last really 45 feet isn’t that far to just use a wire.

last if you go laser I think you need blue as the horses can’t see it. Red would be distracting.

if you want to try what you have again in bright light use colored plastic for the color laser. This will attenuate the effect of the sunlight.