It’s pretty straightforward, there’s three metal contacts. The lowest one is ground, the next one is prefocus, and the last one is the shutter release. The signals are active low. I wired the three to a headphone jack on the bottom of the remote. To test it out I bought a ten dollar motion sensing security light and took out the motion sensor, then wired the output of the sensor to a 120VAC relay. The relay contacts trigger the shutter whenever the motion sensor sees anything.

You can use anything with a switch contact to trigger the camera, just remember that it’s not protected. If you mess up, you can easily fry your camera. Look for “dry” contacts if you are unsure. Canon DSLRs might allow for transistor pull-downs, but I haven’t tried that. It’s easier to just create an isolated contact through a relay for the safety of your camera.

It turns out that the CCD wasn’t what was wrong with my camera though. Canon repaired a slew of these cameras saying that some of the CCDs they sourced were faulty. On my camera the problem was the connector on the mainboard for the CCD, not the CCD itself. The latch that locks in the CCD’s flexible circuit board was incredibly frail. I figured it out by powering up the camera while I had it apart and lightly pressing on the CCD connector. I ended up fixing it with a small piece of foam. There is just enough of a gap between the flash memory housing and the CCD connector to wedge a bit of foam and keep the CCD circuit board contacts securely connected.

The video embed didn’t seem to stay so here is the link to the video instead: http://youtu.be/9Znno5MhP2k

Of course you can always find my videos at YouTube from my channel, imsolidstate.

The CCD of a digital camera is usually protected by a piece of glass that is coated to reject IR, because the sensitivity of the CCD is high enough to infrared that it would make your everyday pictures look a little funny. Simply removing this piece of glass isn’t enough though, as by removing the filter, the effective distance between the CCD and lens group changes. This will mess up your focus. So you have to either buy a custom-made piece of replacement glass, or find a way to move the CCD closer to the lens group. Actually, on my camera I found a way to move the lens closer to the CCD and still retain autofocus and zoom capability. There are quite a few different cameras that can be modified to do this, and a quick google search will get you started if you don’t already have one in mind.

The only other piece of the puzzle is an IR-pass filter. This is because you still have to block out the visible light to get pictures in just infrared. IR-pass filters will look totally black. You can get filters which are sensitive to different wavelengths of IR, but those can be a little expensive. The cheap method that I found was to use a piece of exposed film. If you have an old film leader that’s been exposed and developed, it will be transparent to IR and mostly block visible light. It’s not perfect, but it sure is cheap and gets you started.

Here’s a few shots in infrared. They’re a bit fuzzy around the edges because my film filter doesn’t lay completely flat against the lens. Need to work on that someday.

In this shot the shirt draped across the back of my truck is actually red and black.

I’ve taken quite a few pictures with this camera, but it has a pesky light leak and finding someone that can actually develop and print this film makes shooting with this camera a little tough. Plus it’s heavy. I’ve since moved on to digital stitching software and a special tripod mount for my camera that gives me alot more flexibility. Here are a few of my Horizont adventures though.