CaptureGrid 4 - Shutter Remote options

#1

Hi everyone,

we recently purchased CaptureGrid 4 for our multi-camera body scanning rig, and we want to get it to work with our shutter setup, and I was hoping to get some insight on how we might achieve it. ( we are using several hundred of basic Canon EOS models controlled by Raspberry clones )

We have a bunch of relay modules with shutter cables being triggered through Arduino.

I have noticed that when you trigger the cameras manually/or with our system, the pictures do not appear in CaptureGrid, even though they are on the SD cards inside the cameras, and the shutter-release through USB which is straight from CG4 is not ideal as it triggers the cameras sequentially, i.e. not all at once.

I understand that the photo-batch needs to be initiated by the software itself for it to have control over it ( naming, batch numbering etc. ) but if anyone could give me a few pointers how to achieve external shutter control ( could be even through a USB-connected relay module that triggers the system from the External APIs etc. instead of a wired button that we have ) that would be awesome and help us a lot.

Thank you very much and kind regards,
xulmar

#2

A few things -

  • Make sure you have “storage” set to “disk” or “both”, or CG will only save the the sd card.
  • Relatedly, you need to figure out where you’re saving the photos and set that in CG options (General > Photo download directory). Since you’re running through pi clones, you’ll either want to mount shared external storage or set CG up to sync photos back to the host machine storage.
  • You can trigger externally without issue, just be sure you’ve updated whatever you need to in CG before triggering - a small nuance of that is if you’re typing in a session name or similar, you have to switch focus out of the box to have that take effect reliably
  • USB relays should work, but you’ll have to find or write software to control them.