Tact Switch Woes

Everything camera related. Includes triggers, batteries, power supplies, flatbeds and sheet-feeding scanners, too.

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darkenvy
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Joined: 10 Feb 2013, 23:56
E-book readers owned: ipad, pandigital
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Tact Switch Woes

Post by darkenvy »

Hello everyone, this is my first post on the forum! I have been lurking around for a while and I have built a makeshift cardboard scanner until I can construct my ideal portable scanner. It does the job ^^.

I am only using one camera and shooting my EVENS then my ODDS. The problem I run into is about 15% of my pages turn out blurry. This is enough for any OCR conversion to fail or any illustration pages to look not good enough to publish as an ebook. So my first solution was to put my camera (point and shoot Kodak) into image stabilizing mode. This seemed to knock it down to 5-7% however at the cost of image quality. My pictures are now fuzzy and have jpg compression-like distortions. So this isn't the answer. My next step was to open my camera up and make a remote trigger.

I have experience with soldering so I thought this would be no problem. However I don't have experience with tact switches. This camera has some sort of tact switch I cannot find information on the internet. It's a dual press action tact: half press clicks to focus and full press clicks a second time to shoot.The tact switch has 4 legs. After poking around I have found two legs (diagonal from each other) that will trigger the half press action (focusing) but I can't seem to make it trigger the shutter. Does anyone know much about tact switches? I'de much prefer to go electronic triggering than using the bike brake method :lol:

EDIT: perhaps the tact switch has a connection underneath for the full press contact? I can't seem to lift the board to see as it's connected pretty well to the camera and the flash capacitor is right there. I've been shocked by a disposable flash camera before and it's no fun. :cry:
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darkenvy
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Re: Tact Switch Woes

Post by darkenvy »

bump. My main issue is stability with my point and shoot. I can't build a nice setup with professional equipment until I graduate this spring. So this will have to make due
dpc
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Re: Tact Switch Woes

Post by dpc »

I tried to do something similar with one of my Canon A495s and I eventually gave up. I eventually broke out the checkbook and went the DSLR route and that solved this problem (along with a number of others). Before I did that, I tried using a solenoid to trigger the camera and that seemed to work fine, so that might be another option for you. Search the forums for details.

Have you tried using the shutter timer (2 sec.) so that your hands are off the camera by the time it fires? I don't know what your cardboard scanner looks like, but perhaps you can use something more stable like a tripod for the camera if you have it mounted to a cardboard frame presently.
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Tact Switch Woes

Post by daniel_reetz »

I've done this a few times. You're absolutely on the right track. I doubt that the switch has any connection underneath - they are almost certainly all in front of you. I understand this might be tricky, but can you post a picture of the switch?

Usually three leads are in use. One is a common and two are the two parts of the switch. So you short the "half-press" part to the common and you get autofocus. Then, while KEEPING the half-press "closed", you connect one of the other contacts to common and it fires. You probably can't get it to fire without the half-press. Have you tried that?
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darkenvy
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Re: Tact Switch Woes

Post by darkenvy »

daniel_reetz wrote:I've done this a few times. You're absolutely on the right track. I doubt that the switch has any connection underneath - they are almost certainly all in front of you. I understand this might be tricky, but can you post a picture of the switch?

Usually three leads are in use. One is a common and two are the two parts of the switch. So you short the "half-press" part to the common and you get autofocus. Then, while KEEPING the half-press "closed", you connect one of the other contacts to common and it fires. You probably can't get it to fire without the half-press. Have you tried that?
I have tried this. This is my thoughts exactly. The odd part is that one of the connections on the tact switch begins zooming in?!?! I think I am giving up on this and when I get some money I will spend it on a better camera. I'm in a tight spot ATM so it won't be for a good while. I might try the delay if I could do something like 1s. Any more and it will slow down my manual process from 7-10s/page to 8-11s/page. This of course adds up severely :P

I'm wondering if there is software to trigger the camera. I run linux but can run OSX and windows. I have a USB cable to the camera.
tresho
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Re: Tact Switch Woes

Post by tresho »

I'm wondering if there is software to trigger the camera. I run linux but can run OSX and windows. I have a USB cable to the camera.
What camera do you have?
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