ShAKY (SHift Angle KentuckY camera sensor module) with Xsync

thingiverse

Shaky (Shift Angle Kentucky) is a small module designed to be mounted at the base of any camera -- an earlier version was specific to the Canon PowerShot ELPH 160 or ELPH 180 and lacked Xsync support. Via a USB cable, Shaky can continuously report 9-axis position data with sufficient accuracy to distinguish position changes that alter the sensor image by less than a single pixel shift - the graph above shows an example of shake recorded during an exposure. Why do this? Well, my lab at the University of Kentucky created Shaky for various research experiments involving new methods to obtain better images in the presence of camera shake. It's posted here partly as documentation of our research, but also because the sensor assembly is surprisingly cheap and this packaging of it may serve as a good reference for coming up with packaging of the sensor module for other applications. The IS&T Electronic Imaging research paper overviewing it, source code, etc. are posted at Aggregate.org/DIT/Shaky. The working parts are two circuit boards and a 3.5mm jack with a debounce capacitor. The smaller (top-mounted) board is a $9 MPU9250/6500 9-Axis sensor module that measures movement in X, Y, Z, roll, pitch, and yaw as well as absolute X, Y, Z orientation using a magnetometer. The larger (bottom-mounted) board is a $6 Pro Micro ATmega32U4 Arduino that provides a programmable USB interface to the sensor. The USB interface also powers both boards. The jack is for the Xsync signal from the camera. Thus, the entire unit build cost is under $20.