This thread actually made me sign up to the forum. Looks great to me, though a haven't read all the posts yet.
At the moment, I have around a dozen SLR cameras from the 1960's / 1970's in my drawer and would really love to test their shutter speeds.
When browsing other forums on this topic, what puzzled me most is the discussion of whether it's needed to have a dual sensor or a single sensor device for our measurement.
In my understanding, once we have a light source that's close enough to an ideal point source aiming at our receiver we should do fine with only one emitter & receiver and achieve valid results.
Am I missing the point? I'm here to learn and discuss, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
First of all: thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question in such detail. Very much appreciated! For the very first time, somebody gave me an explanation that at least brings me close to understanding the topic. From the quality of your answer I assume that you do not only design electronics, but also teach the subject?Simply put, no a single sensor will not work.
That's exactly the plan. First I'll browse the rest of the thread in order not to miss more recent developments, and then I'll scan my smallish hobby department for required parts. Most should already in stock.So what do we do? (build my shutter tester it works)
First of all: thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question in such detail. Very much appreciated! For the very first time, somebody gave me an explanation that at least brings me close to understanding the topic. From the quality of your answer I assume that you do not only design electronics, but also teach the subject?
That's exactly the plan. First I'll browse the rest of the thread in order not to miss more recent developments, and then I'll scan my smallish hobby department for required parts. Most should already in stock.
Regarding your Arduino code: since I'm a new member, I can't send you a PM yet to ask for a copy. But it's well possible that I will gain the required number of 20 posts until the stuff arrives. There's much interesting stuff in this forum to discuss.
What the heck is EV(x)?
Made an account to post in this thread as I recently decided to make a shutter speed tester. I have even bought a four pack of the laser emitters and detectors used by Niglyn. I was going to just use one sensor because I wasn't considering some of the things Niglyn posted about at higher shutter speeds.
What I need is to confirm the shutter speeds on a Nikon FE that I repaired. The camera is in perfect cosmetic condition but had a lazy light meter that hovered around the middle of the range in all light conditions. Not sure what I did to fix it but something must have connected/disconnected while I was probing the light detector diodes with a multimeter and the light meter is back to normal (yay!). My issue is that I also moved one of the pots that control shutter speed while doing this (boo!). The Nikon FE/FE2 repair manual clearly states how to adjust that pot based on shutter speed and EV value.
A few questions.
1. What the heck is EV(x)? Is EV14 the light level that causes the light meter to move to the 14th position (In my case 1/1000)? In the github, its mentioned the LED light box gives EV13. Is that specific to a particular camera or is that universal?
2. If my shutter moves vertically, can I just use the laser emitter/detector instead of the light box? And would I put the light sensors one on top of the other centered in the frame?
This software has spawned the creation of some very nice shutter testers!
Thanks for the info MattKing and Niglyn. The shutter tester gets me half way but I'm still unsure about producing EV light values and could use some tips.
Below is the Nikon repair manual on the adjustment of the potentiometer i messed with. The pot is correct once (a) and (b) result in the same shutter speed.
What's the most reasonable way to To get EV4 and EV14 at home? For example for EV4, do I use a known-good camera, set set ASA to 100, set shutter speed to 1/4sec and f=2.0 then increase the light until the meter matches that setting. Or do I get an external light meter?
View attachment 373062
Three photos below.
First shows camera under test, using rear-mounted sensors (masking tape holding it in position) and a cheap Aliexpress LED light source.
Note LED light must be on full. If dimmed, it uses PWM which pulses the LEDs on & off thousands of times a second, which will give LED flicker warning on tester.
Note flash sync cable connected to side of the camera.
Next picture is of the TFT screen showing changes, removal of uS values to make space for uncalibrated senor reading (first reading on the screen)
and
curtain travel speed from right to middle then middle to Left (L-M M-R) for each curtain.
I hope that makes sense?
Third photo is a screen grab, showing output on the PC screen.
View attachment 372455
Hi,
Yes you can leave out the Lasers and replace them with a light source and film gate sensor box.
Yes, the TFT and LCD are both optional, so you can leave out the LCD screen.
There is a post within this thread by someone saying hardware in srozum's project is open source, but I will not comment on the use of his parts for mine.
It would be nice if somebody with a 3d printer & skills were to make a film-gate box for use with my tester and share the files, maybe even a project box, in return & appreciation for the hours I have spent building & sharing my project, writing all the documentation etc.
The light source used must not be using PWM to dim it. The light source shown in my parts list is PWM, but at full brightness runs at 100% PWM so works fine if turned to full brightness and the colour wheel is also turned fully up.
..
I'm close to completing the build of the shutter tester and I have a couple of questions regarding the wiring before firing it up...
There are some differences between what's written on my extension board and the drawing from the PDF. For instance, in the schematic between Pin 12 and pin 13 there's a pin named VB. On my board there's a GND (and judging by what wires connect to that pin it makes sense to be a ground pin).
Other differences don't involve used pins (on my board, on the lower right side from bottom to top, I have CLK, SDO, SD1, P15 - instead of the 06, 07, 08, 15 on the schematic. On the left side, bottom to top, I have 5V, GND, SD3, SD2, P13, GND, P12 - instead of the IN, 11, 10, 09, 13, VB, 12 on the schematic and on the left top side I have SVP and SVN instead of 36 and 39)
If you could just confirm that I've wired correctly and VB = GND...
Even with my method, it is not fool-proof. It is assumed the curtain moves linearly. The curtain has to start from zero and accelerate up and then at the other end, it maybe slowing down due to worn or mal-adjusted springs, or still accelerating. The second curtain may do the same, or the exact opposite!
I was just thinking about this from a software point of view, and thought I'd make a suggestion for "linearity testing" that could be used for a readout of some kind.
Having a simple readout of the deviation between sensor points would be very useful. Using the data you've already acquired would make this easy. A, B and C points when light has been detected, as well as A, B, and C points when light has stopped being detected. This will tell you at what ms the opening shutter reached the pionts, and at what ms the closing shutter reached the points. You can just check the delta between the points to determine in ms (or any other metric you like, really) how much faster the shutter is moving on one side than the other.
If you have a known working, fully accurate camera, you could even make a simple lookup table for "acceptable acceleration boundaries" to give a readout if the curtain trajectories are out of spec. eg, according to the table, an acceleration of 0.20ms between points is acceptable, as the curtain races to the end - but the actual reading states that the A to B points were 0.20ms, but the B to C points were 0.35ms, indicating that the shutter was slowing down as it approached the end of its travel. This would indicate a non-linear acceleration and something amiss. More sensors (5 instead of 3 for instance) would improve accuracy.
But, I might not know what I'm talking about
Edit: I realised some of this information is, in fact, already displayed on the larger LCD versions, but my idea still stands for interpreting the acceleration and displaying the linearity!
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