If you’ve taken almost any math classes over the last decade, chances are good you have a graphing calculator sitting around in some drawer somewhere. And while we can’t promise you’ll ever use what you learned in Calculus (an engineer friend of mine used to call it ‘calcuseless’) the folks over at JACP Media can help put that old calculator to use by turning it into a homebrew intervalometer.

The whole process will take less than 5 minutes, even once you factor in the minor ‘programming’ you’ll have to do. Materials required are: a TI-84 graphing calculator (you shouldn’t be limited to this model, but let us know in the comments if you run into issues with other versions), a 2.5mm audio cable, and a DSLR with a shutter release port.

That’s it, from there you just create a very simple program, plug the calculator into the camera, and you’ve got yourself an intervalometer.

Of course, you can buy a basic intervalometer for next to nothing online, and there are even apps that’ll handle the task for you, but where’s the fun in that?! Plus, we’ll bet your intervalometer can’t graph integrals…