The CHDK firmware for Canon point-and-shoot cameras includes a USB remote trigger feature that depends on simply applying +5 V to the USB power leads, which is exactly what happens when you plug an ordinary USB cable into a PC.

Chopping up a spare cable, adding header pins, attaching a bench supply, and whacking the pins with clip leads showed that the camera takes quite a while to haul itself to its feet and click the shutter:

Canon SX230HS – USB trigger – flash

That’s with:

• Manual mode: preset shutter & aperture
• Manual focus
• Focus assist off
• Image stabilization off
• AF guide light off
• Red eye reduction off
• Flash enabled, medium intensity, precharged

Turning the flash off slightly reduces the delay, at least judging from when I hear the shutter click while watching the trace trundle across the screen. I may have forgotten to turn something else off, but I doubt it’ll get an order of magnitude faster.

I’d hoped to synchronize an outboard flash with the shutter, but watching a few traces shows that the time from trigger to flash isn’t very consistent; maybe 100 ms jitter, more or less.

The CHDK motion-sensing script works and is “lightning fast”, but it turns out that lightning strokes actually glow for tens to hundreds of milliseconds, so my 1 ms xenon flash will be over and done with by the time the script reacts and opens the camera shutter.

Other ways to synchronize an outboard flash with the shutter:

1. Fire the outboard flash from the camera flash, with the camera flash inside a shield
2. Use an absurdly long shutter time with the camera & objects inside a very, very dark enclosure
3. Use the CHDK motion detection script, but blink an LED into the lens to trigger the shutter, then fire the xenon flash to expose the image

Choice 1 has positive synchronization to the camera shutter, but the shutter delay jitter means the flash won’t happen after a fixed delay from the triggering event. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think.

Choice 2 requires that the shutter stay open longer than the maximum delay jitter, so the flash will happen at known time after the triggering event. I like that, but not the dark enclosure part.

Choice 3 depends on the timing jitter of the script, which should be on the order of a few tens of milliseconds. A shutter speed of 1/25 s = 40 ms might be Good Enough.

This obviously requires a bit of Arduino fiddling…