A remotely-triggered camera let me get this shot without having to sit in the balcony all night waiting for it.

The Panasonic Lumix G1 is a compact Micro Four Thirds camera that takes excellent pictures and accepts a wide range of lenses. I use mine a lot — but, being cheap, I’d like to get even more use out of it. For example, I’d like to be able to fire the shutter by remote control.

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Why? Well, I sometimes like to mount a camera remotely — in a theater balcony, for example — to get a second viewpoint while I’m elsewhere with my main camera. (I’ve been doing this trick for a long time — I made the photo at the top of this post with a Minolta X700 film camera, fired by an infrared remote control, ‘way back in the Year of Our Lord 1983!)

As a remote camera, the G1 seems to have a lot going for it: its small size and light weight should make it easy to mount on a bracket, and its multi-folding LCD viewfinder would help aim it when it’s attached at some crazy angle.

Just one problem: Panasonic doesn’t offer a remote-control interface for the G1! Oh, they make a cable switch, the DMW-RSL1 — but that just moves the shutter button to the end of a wire; it doesn’t provide any way to connect, say, a tripper switch or a PocketWizard wireless flash trigger, both of which I wanted to be able to use. Oh, yeah, and it also costs upward of fifty bucks!… a bit steep if all I were going to do were cut it apart to get at the guts inside.

Yes, you can find wired and wireless remote triggers for the G1 on eBay… and if you don’t mind contributing to China’s stranglehold on the world economy, you might want to go right ahead and buy one. Me? I decided to try to bodge together something myself, so I could configure it the way I wanted. The main question was how.

I already had tried simply plugging a 2.5mm mono phone plug into the G1′s remote socket and bridging the contacts with a wire; that works on many cameras that have electrical remote release terminals. No soap here, though: nothing happened.

Fortunately, the invaluable Instructables website had the answer. I’ve redrawn their schematic diagram in a way that made more sense to me (see above) but the basics are simple. Panasonic uses three resistors to interface a remote switch to the G1: a 36KΩ (that’s kilo-ohms), a 3KΩ, and a 2KΩ, connected in series.

Actually, the resistor values aren’t very critical: I used a 33K, a 3.3K, and a 2.2K because that was what Radio Shack carried, and they worked fine.

Closing S1 (switch #1) shorts out the big 36K resistor — taking it out of play, so it no longer has any effect. That sends the same message to the camera as if you had half-pressed the shutter release button: it turns on the meter and AF systems so the camera is ready to fire.

Closing S2 (switch #2) shorts out both the 36K and 3K resistors, and does the same as if you had pressed the shutter release fully: if the metering and AF aren’t already on, they light up, and then the shutter fires as soon afterward as possible.

The trick with the resistors lets Panasonic get two functions — half-press and full-press — with only two electrical contacts; most cameras would need three, one each for half-press and full-press, plus one common ground connector.

The next problem was how to connect the resistors to the camera. Panasonic is using a tiny 2.5mm, 4-conductor plug as its remote terminal (and also to connect an external microphone to its video-enabled cameras; that’s not a factor with the G1.) This little plug, as I discovered, is NOT something you simply can walk into a local electronics store and buy — not where I live, anyway.

But that solution turned out to be easy as well. Many cell phones use a 2.5mm, 4-conductor cable to connect an auxiliary headset. And many stores — including Radio Shack and Best Buy — sell a little adapter like the one pictured above, which converts a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone plug so you can plug it into the phone’s 2.5mm jack. The adapter cost less than $10 and fits perfectly into the G1′s remote socket.

Looking more closely at the adapter’s 2.5mm end, you can see it has four electrical contacts: one on the tip, and three along the barrel. As you saw in the schematic diagram above, Panasonic runs the remote-control connection through the second and third barrel contacts — the ones closest to the plug body. Conveniently, sticking a mono 3.5mm plug into the other end of the adapter automatically maps its two contacts to the correct ones on the 2.5mm plug!

In theory, this means you could make a remote control by doing nothing more than twisting the three resistors together, stripping one end off a 3.5mm mono patch cord, attaching the resistors to the stripped end, and plugging the other end into the cell-phone adapter. Short the leads of the appropriate resistors together and your G1′s shutter will fire. Hard to get more bare-bones than that.

But it ain’t kool if it ain’t kustom, right? So, uh, I added some stuff…

Here’s the “control panel” of my completed remote interface. You can see the three resistors along the top. The red button below them fires the shutter; the toggle switch at center bottom lets me lock the circuit in the “half-pressed” position for faster shutter response (at the expense of some extra battery drain.)

The 3.5mm jack on the right is where I plug in a cable that leads to the G1 (where it connects via the cell-phone adapter pictured above.) The 3.5mm jack on the left lets me plug in one of my PocketWizard flash triggers for long-range wireless remote shutter firing.

Getting the PocketWizard to work, though, was a bit tricky. I discovered that I couldn’t connect it directly to the resistor strip; apparently its internal resistance is fairly high, and that plus the resistors didn’t leave enough juice to fire the camera! So instead I added a relay (the blue-striped thing next to the button) — the PocketWizard trips the relay, and the relay fires the G1.

The relay needed its own power source to run through the PocketWizard, so I added a “daughterboard” with two 3V lithium batteries. The daughterboard also gave me room to mount two binding posts (the red and black things) — these will let me connect various kinds of switches to the trigger circuit using bare wire, spade lugs, or banana plugs.

Note to self: Don't try to get onto a commercial flight with this baby in the hand luggage!

Folding the main board and daughterboard back-to-back and assembling them with some screws and standoffs makes a sturdy, fairly neat-looking package. Now I should be ready to rig out my G1 for almost any kind of remote-triggered photography!

For reference (and sheer geek-a-liciousness) here’s my final as-built schematic (the only things missing are the binding posts:)