The phonemenal advance of 'keitai' portable phones with their feature laden cameras makes them makes them potentially useful for kap. My NTT DoCoMo Mova with its 2 mega pixels has a useful manual focus but I'm unable to force a high shutter speed and in the series of photographs shown here averaged 1/300. Not good enough, but mine is a generation behind the new 5 mega pixel phones cameras and there is going to be a lot more after them.
The shutter servo is a Futaba S3108 and the panning servo is a GWS Micro 2BB with metal gears which converts easily to 360 rotation. The frame is made from 1 x 20 mm aluminium which is finger bendable but that's all you really need, unless you have it in your shirt pocket when somebody hugs you.
The rig is controlled by a Tucit-Duo. I could have used a standard Tucit Duo battery+switch+2servo connector if I hadn't already cut the plugs off the servos. The phone needs a full 10 seconds to write each image but it can pack over 200 pictures onto a 128 mb card and still leave room for address lists various documents and a couple ebooks.
This phone has an autosave option though some seem to need two seperate pushes, one for the shutter and a second to save the picture. I tested Tucit's double 'wake-up' setting a workaround for such phones it and it was fine - the servos pushing down twice then turning once for each picture.
As usual I dithered about what kind of battery to use. A rechargable ni-cd 4.8 volt battery could have made it all a bit lighter. But I came down in favour of a 9 volt battery (with 5 volt voltage regulater) because you can buy them anywhere and no weight is saved if you have to pack a chunky battery charger when you travel. But I do admit a ni-cad would have looked better.
This tiny, simple, very reliable rig is my perfect back-up. Meanwhile my eyes on are on those gleaming phone shops.
