Digitize your outdated slides with a contemporary DSLR digital camera

Till the proliferation of digital pictures, movie slides had been a typical strategy to share images. After a pleasant trip within the ‘70s, you may take your movie rolls for improvement and would have the choice to obtain a set of slides. You could possibly then collect your whole pals in your front room, pop these slides right into a projector carousel, and drive everybody to have a look at unfocused footage of palm bushes projected onto the wall. In case you nonetheless have a set of slides (or inherited your mother and father’ assortment), this video from Scott Lawrence demonstrates one technique for changing them to digital images.

This method may appear rudimentary, however it’s fairly efficient. In case you have a look at it from a excessive degree, it’s primarily simply snapping images of the slides with a contemporary DSLR digital camera. However these cameras are able to capturing very high-quality footage and this course of is simple to automate. The important thing to that automation is using a classic slide carousel. They’re reasonably priced and straightforward to regulate with a microcontroller, which makes them excellent for this utility.

On this case, Lawrence used an Arduino Leonardo board. It controls two issues: the slide carousel and the digital camera’s shutter. The person interface, made with a six-digit seven-segment show and a rotary encoder, lets the operator setup the variety of slides to seize, the pause between slides, backlight brightness, and so forth. When activated, the controller tells the carousel to load a slide, triggers the digital camera’s shutter, after which repeats with the subsequent slide. Every slide solely takes a number of seconds to load and seize, which implies this may digitize greater than a thousand slides per hour.