WWKW 2009 - And Counting

So there are six days 'till WWKW 2009, and I just noticed my shutter servo tab has cracked, and my rig is inoperable.

AAAAAARGH!

I'm glad I saw it, though. Nothing worse than to have gear fail in the air and not know it. The way it happened was this:

One of my leg brackets wound up getting bent about a week ago, resulting in a crack almost completely through the bracket. Rather than risk failure, I ordered a new pair of leg brackets from Brooxes.com along with a folding Picavet.

The folding Picavet really is a thing of beauty. It comes in two pieces, and replaces the stock single-piece Picavet. By pulling a quick pin, you can rotate the top half of the Picavet, which can then be rotated parallel to the rig for some really compact packing. Even better, in the packed position there's a second hole to insert the quick pin so that it locks the Picavet in that position, too.

After installing the new Picavet, re-lacing my Picavet lines because I couldn't keep the pulleys straight, removing the broken leg bracket and my old antenna bracket, and installing the new leg bracket, I finally saw that my shutter servo was sitting at some oddball angle. Oh dear...

I toyed around with the idea of building a new bracket, and even bent up some of my 1/64" brass strip stock while testing out a couple of ideas. In the end I went back to trying to get the GentLED-CHDK2 working with my camera, a Canon Powershot A650IS. When I first got it I had no end of problems trying to get the A650 to recognize the timing coming out of the CHDK2. Things hadn't improved, and more testing only indicated the same behavior.

As a last ditch effort, I asked to see if I could exchange the CHDK2 for a GentLED-CHDK, which does work remarkably well with the A650IS. Hoping for a positive response.

If not, I've got enough Atmel ATtiny hardware lying around to make a fair simulacrum of a GentLED-CHDK, and can get that built before WWKW 2009. And failing that I'll sacrifice another shutter servo to my existing bracket, knowing full-well the mounting tab will likely crack off within the year.

I'm not giving up on my chances of doing massive KAP during WWKW 2009, but I hate having set-backs this late in the game. It makes me paranoid.

Tom