Simple Hands-free Camera Remote Hack

You need to have a canon rebel XT for this to work. I needed to make a custom remote for my new camera. I wanted to use buttons that were easier to push. The Canon RS60-E3 Remote has two functions focus and shutter (but you don’t really need both for most shots). When you press the shutter, the camera focuses first anyway. The remote uses a 2.5-mm stereo jack.

We had an adaptive switch that I was also using to answer my phone (it is plugged into a wireless phone transmitter when not used for my camera – more on the phone project later.

We tried to use a splitter to separate the two functions but were unable to achieve that. We only really cared about the shutter so the other function may or may not be necessary, depending on what you want to do. If you really want to use both functions with your remote, you should see this article for example.

Hooking it all up

Basically, we had a 3.5-mm mono jack on the end of our switch. We didn’t want to cut the end off of our switch so instead we cut the end off of a random audio female cable we had laying around and used that as our 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter. So, basically, we built an adapter because we didn’t feel like going to radio shack. If we didn’t care about the switch, we would have just wired the switch to the one side (seemed like either channel worked the same) of the mini 2.5 mm stereo audio jack (the small size like the cellphone jack size).
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Parts need

  • 1 Cable with 2.5 mm audio jack
  • 1 Y-adapter that will fit your switch.
  • 1 Adaptive switch – example TASH (or any switch with an audio style jack end (or else put one on and switch).


 Resources

Where to get a switch:

Enabling Devices
TASH – Switchs
Adaptivation

Remote help:

MAKE – Make your own remote
Canon RS60-E3 Remote Pin-Out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_plug