The Nautilus was my first venture into the wonderful world of Arduino. It all started with an article from a German photographer on how he had wired a GoPro action cam with a big button and four lamps and put it in a plastic box to create a photo booth for a wedding. Shortly after I read this story, my sister announced that she was going to marry. Obviously I would shoot the wedding photographs – I was a photographer at the time – but such a photo booth seemed very appealing too, for guests to take their own pictures.

I didn’t have a GoPro lying around, but I had something better: an older Canon D40 DSLR camera, and a wide-angle lens. Wiring this was a bit more complicated though, especially when I thought it necessary to add a progress indicator, a tinkle bell and a smoke machine. I had heard about Arduino microcontrollers, but didn’t have any experience with them yet. Fortunately, it turned out to be quite easy to work with these. Adding some basic electronics wasn’t too hard either.

For some reason in my mind this machine needed to look like it was created by Jules Verne, so I created the body out of dark, curved wood panels with a supporting frame of copper tubes and brass couplings. The name is a direct reference to Jules Verne’s 1870 novel “20.000 Leagues Under the Sea”

One of my favorite features of the Nautilus is the countdown block, formed by two numeric “nixie tubes,” old gas discharge tubes that contained the numbers 0 through 9. These number displays were used in NASA control centers, old nuclear power plants, and on the Wall Street stock exchange to display stock prices from the 1950s to the 1970s. They are difficult to combine with modern electronics because they operate on 180 volts DC, many times more than the usual 5 or 3.3 volts of modern microcontrollers. Also, nixies have not been manufactured for a long time. I bought mine in Ukraine, an old batch that had surfaced somewhere. I bought the 180 volt power supply in Switzerland and the special microchips to switch the high voltage of the letters on and off came from eBay. A nice story is that a young Czech started a small factory in 2017 to produce new nixies. He seems to be doing well.