I have an 8x10 pinhole camera that I made out of foamcore. It works very well and takes good pictures. The guess method of exposure can work pretty well, but I have an "If it ain't broke, fix it till it is" attitude sometimes.
I rigged up an integrating light meter with some simple parts. It uses a CdS cell bought at radioshack in a box of "assorted cells". It's my understanding that CdS cells have a fairly peaked green-sensitivity. The CdS cell is hooked up through a pot into a capacitor, which it charges at a speed proportional to the light intensity. An analog comparator IC monitors the voltage across the cap and turns an LED on (soon to be a piezo buzzer) when it reaches the voltage set by a separate trim pot. At that point you have to manually close the shutter. I considered building an an automatic shutter, but I wanted the ability to override the meter.
The integrating nature of the meter is what makes it so useful...if the sun goes behind clouds, or is in the process of setting, the meter will automatically take more exposure time to compensate. Some people might point out that charging a capacitor is not in the strictest sense a linear process, but if you keep the threshold voltage to below one time constant, it is linear for practical purposes. You can trip the meter in about 2 seconds by shining a flashlight on the sensor from the front. A bug is that the meter will eventually trip after like 18 hours in the complete dark because there is a finite dark current through the LDR. After setting the trim pot to give 20s exposure in bright sunlight, it has been pretty much spot-on in every situation since then, and I have learned to trust it entirely
You can see, next to the proper pinhole, down in the corner is the separate pinhole with a shrink-tube sunshade to give a center-weighted reading. The CdS cell is glued internally.
Inside view
I rigged up an integrating light meter with some simple parts. It uses a CdS cell bought at radioshack in a box of "assorted cells". It's my understanding that CdS cells have a fairly peaked green-sensitivity. The CdS cell is hooked up through a pot into a capacitor, which it charges at a speed proportional to the light intensity. An analog comparator IC monitors the voltage across the cap and turns an LED on (soon to be a piezo buzzer) when it reaches the voltage set by a separate trim pot. At that point you have to manually close the shutter. I considered building an an automatic shutter, but I wanted the ability to override the meter.
The integrating nature of the meter is what makes it so useful...if the sun goes behind clouds, or is in the process of setting, the meter will automatically take more exposure time to compensate. Some people might point out that charging a capacitor is not in the strictest sense a linear process, but if you keep the threshold voltage to below one time constant, it is linear for practical purposes. You can trip the meter in about 2 seconds by shining a flashlight on the sensor from the front. A bug is that the meter will eventually trip after like 18 hours in the complete dark because there is a finite dark current through the LDR. After setting the trim pot to give 20s exposure in bright sunlight, it has been pretty much spot-on in every situation since then, and I have learned to trust it entirely
You can see, next to the proper pinhole, down in the corner is the separate pinhole with a shrink-tube sunshade to give a center-weighted reading. The CdS cell is glued internally.
Inside view