To find the power, focus and shutter switches on this old camera, I disassembled it screw-by-screw. I only shocked myself once on the flash capacitor. I thought I'd never get the camera back together. It might have been better to have ground away the buttons with my Dremel tool. The nice thing about this camera is that when connected to and external 3.3 v power supply it never goes to sleep. This way it doesn't lose settings like "no flash" and the lens does not have to be extended for each frame. If make a 10 minute movie, that would be 18,000 frames. I'd guess that's pretty much the life of that mechanism. Now I wonder about the shutter and focus mechanism. How long will it last?
To use the camera, first touch the two "on" button wires together.
To focus, hold the brown and blue wire together.
To snap a frame, touch the white wire to the brown and blue.
This is the board with four relays that I made. It'll control the camera with one relay to spare. I made it generic as possible. I think the Arduino could probably have driven the relays, but I used some 2N2222 transistors anyway. The funny thing about these relays is that they have polarity. I thought maybe they had an internal protection diode, but when I ohmed it out, it was about 120 ohms both ways. I read up on this type of relay, and I think the armature may have a magnet on it to reduce the current requirement. The bad thing about that is if you wire it backwards, the armature is repelled, and the relay won't close. The other thing generic about this board is that I kept the PWM pins in reserve using only the pure digital I/O pins. The pin numbers are going to be numbered funny in the firmware, but this way all the analog outputs are available if needed.
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