The bane of my existence

For the past week I have been messing around with electronics with hope to build a timer based remote shutter trigger for my camera to make time lapse movies. I did my research, I had most of the requisite parts I only needed to find a 555 timer chip which I found locally at systems and innovations for what would work out to 0.50 USD. Normally these local people rip you off if you can even find a store that has items in stock.

So everything was a go and I plugged up my breadboard based on some schematics I found online that was supposed to achieve my stated goal.. fail. Nothing happened, well the green led did come on but the timer wasn't oscillating, so it was back to the drawing board. I read the 555 tutorial with a new goal of understanding the timer and made a new circuit of my own design that got it putting out a pulse, a step in the right direction.

I had given up from the start on doing this in the few hours I spend at home before I fall asleep at night so I carried my bits and bobs to the corporate office and was working in my cubicle *sigh*. Most of the people who noticed I was doing something other than hacking away at my keyboard made some comment of me making a device to blow them up. lol really? is this the first thing that comes to peoples mind when they see tiny wires and batteries?

After several days of failure I eventually settled on a design that gave me an adjustable pulse train with the right duty cycle I hooked it up to my camera, it works! With sparse subjects for time lapse photography I selected myself to star my first recording. I have long had interest in seeing what I did in my sleep so I left my camera snapping away as I apparently to tossed and turned but never slept on my stomach but I'm sure these details will bore you along with the rest of this post so I'll spare my readers any more and also spare y'all the HD[1080p] video of me sleeping too lol.

Also in news last week, my car battery gave up the ghost and decided to leave me stranded at home one morning. I went over to my neighbour and knocked on his window to ask him for a jump start. He was so fast asleep which I knew he would be and I felt bad but I needed to leave and wasn't about to fork out what ever taxis charge these days to get on my way. Of course he didn't have any jumper cables but us being resourceful men I fashioned two cables capable of carrying 30-45A that should be sufficient to turn over my small engine. It worked and all was well but this was the first time in 5 years of me owning my car that I turned the key and it didn't start. It was different, made me want to be more prepared, time to get a new[less old] car.. too bad I can't afford it now.