Recently while trying to find bits of the Internet that I’d missed I found Arduino. A simple to program micro-controller with some great community contributions. It’s open source hardware. I soon got an idea for a project and set to. I’d make an intervalometer for my Nikon D5000 DSLR camera. The D5000 in common with a few Nikon DSLRs has an infra-red remote control to fire the shutter. I’d build an infrared remote control and a timer to fire it at preset intervals so I could do time lapse photography. This project is now complete and I hope to create a video very soon to upload here.

But that was just the start. I decided to give myself a further challenge. I may pay for a few electronic components, but all the software I’ll use with my projects will be free, open source. So far I’ve changed from Windows 7 to the Ubunto 11.04 Linux distribution and I’m developing Arduino code on using the open source Arduino IDE. But the challenge is about to begin. No more Photoshop, or Windows tools to process photographs and create the video.