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#386 bulb cable
It would be very nice for an astrophotographer to be able to control a Nikon or a Canon camera with a special "bulb cable" it is only the RTS pin in a RS232 port that need to be programmed high or low. Here is the schematic with some code examples written in basic, pretty simple.
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/dslr/CanonRelease.html
It is only to things that need to be input from the user, a way to select port and shutter time with an interval of 30 sek to 2 hours or more.
These "bulb cable" are the standards, commonly wide used.
What for do you need this additional cable if you can trigger capture (including bulb mode) via USB port with appropriate commands? I successfully did it on canon 40D.
Hello, you got lucky if your camera support it, only few of the newest cameras does have this more then 30 seconds buld feature. My Nikon D80 does need a bulb cable to capture more then 30 seconds controlled through the computer. I didn't found a specific list of cameras that need this special bulb cable but most of the DSLR from Canon and Nikon does need it. It would be very nice with an opensource altrnative to MaximDL that costs lot of money and does not work in Linux enviroment.
well, the newer Canon EOS DSLR can do programmed bulb capture over USB.
For others
If you can program the bulk cable via serial port, you can do run a small program alongside gphoto2 for instance to help here.
I own Nikon D80 and it is not possible to set bulb mode with USB cable. But it is possible with serial cable. Howtos can be found here: http://www.beskeen.com/projects/dslr_serial/dslr_serial.shtml and here: http://www.df9cy.de/download.htm
There is existing very rudimentary but working program that can work with this cable: http://debianletters.blogspot.cz/2007/12/long-time-remote-shooting-with-canon.html
However it would be nice to see this integrated in gphoto2 as it would allow for more advanced use of this "hack".