When is a switch not a switch?

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

Morning,

I'm hacking a early 2000's Fuji point-and-shoot camera to be a timelapse camera so I can photograph some seeds growing on my windowsill.

At the moment I have two servos rigged up to push the butons manually, but would like to move to full electronic control using transistors.

I've seen many instructables on this topic, and although the camera is old, I don't wanto to risk damaging it by soldering wires in there and touching them together to see what they do!

There are two switches in the camera.

(1) The power switch, which is activated by a slider and looks a bit like a normal pushbutton switch with a shark fin sticking out (that's the bit which gets pushed); and

(2) The shutter switch, which has 4 pins and looks like any other pushbutton switch.

I've done what I normally do to test swithc pinouts and put my multimeter in "diode" mode to see which connections make / break when the switches are pressed. I think the power switch has two which are NO and become closed when pressed, so that's ok. Although I still don't udnerstand what all 4 pins are doing (some just change resisitance).

On the shutter switch, none of the pins seem to connect to each other to make / break when I push it.

Is there some issue with my testing precedure? or am I missing a NOOB point about these tiny switches... My understanding is that they will usually close so as to ground something or pull something high within the device?

Kind regards,

Steve

2

Hi,
Does the camera have auto focus?
If so then pressing the shutter button halfway down will usually activate the auto focus.
Then pressing all the way will cause the electronic shutter to operate.
So the button has three positions, OFF, FOCUS , SHOOT.

Tom..... :slight_smile:

3

Thanks Tom,

I've seen some cameras operate like that, however this is a bog standard point-and-shoot with fixed focus.

It does a similar thing but with duration of press. Holding for a short while sets the exposure, holding longer takes the picture.

I'll have a play about more when I get home.

4

"Holding for a short while sets the exposure, holding longer takes the picture."

Not sure anyone has produced a camera that works that way. It would make it extremely slow to take a photo. In that early 2000 cameras already had pretty bad shutter lag, building it into the process would be a bit silly.

An exposure lock on a fixed focus camera would be pretty unusual too.

I'd suggest looking up reviews or user manuals for the camera. Doesn't necessarily have to be for the exact model's docs to be of use.