Hardware for camera array trigger

shutterdeck wrote:

What it means is that the device triggers the pulse to all cameras simultaneously,

That's what I thought, but you need to say it that way because actual sync is a lot less precise. It's very difficult to get cameras capturing +/-1ms; +/-1us never happens.

You might be right that not all cameras support 3-wire remote anymore, but I've been using Nikons up to D610 and and we have not had support issues.

You should take a look at the various sites talking about KAP -- Kite Aerial Photography. They explain all the different ways you can trigger and give circuits to do it.

It's literally a decade old (has it really been that long since I updated it? D*mn. It has.), but there is also my pages on Capture Control Of Digital Cameras .  Probably most people triggering fleets of cameras are using piles of Canon PowerShots with this 5V USB detection trigger ... we certainly do in my research group (I have a paper submitted to Electronic Imaging 2018 overviewing a bunch of our camera clusters, but I'm still waiting to hear about acceptance).

The more recent change is that many cameras now work quite well via either USB or 802.11 wifi tether.  Typical USB uses a slotted protocol based on 120us intervals, so latency to signal the camera is less than 240us... and that's significantly less time than it usually takes for the camera to do it's thing. Typical operating systems inside cameras use a scheduler jiffy of 1/1000s (1ms), so that's about as fast as they can respond. Of course, focus, etc., takes much longer, so you have to prefocus and set exposure (like the half-press signal on 3-wire) long enough beforehand so that it's really ready to trip the shutter -- otherwise, you'll wait random amounts of time for that.