Flaming the Bear

I've spent yesterday and part of this morning rigging up a digi-cam that I mentioned earlier. It's been a lot more challenging than I expected. This is mostly due to the fact that I decided to use opto-couplers in place of reed relays to trigger the camera shutter and refresh. Theres' been a couple of challenges so far and I hope to get things resolved some time today. After fighting with it this morning I'm taking a breather so that I don't frustrated and start wrecking things. Did you know for instance, that transistors may not all be wired the same? These little do-dads have 3 pins, now you would assume that the pins would be arranged the same irregardless of who made them - NOT so. That's a real head banger! Hours of testing and checking coming down to the collector & emitter pins not being standardized! Anyway I've got the camera firing now, I just need to get the refresh circuit working and the count LED co-operating again and the rig will be ready to box.

A friend and I went out and checked the 2 camera's I do have out right now, 1 needed a full roll of film while the other had only taken 16 pic's BUT the batteries were deader than a door nail. I'm afraid the first camera will only have a full roll of bird pic's like the last time. I'm not sure if I'll make the drive to Stettler today or wait a week and pull the film on the other camera next week @ the same time. If I go today I'll try and post some pic's here later on.