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Using the Canon Hack Development Kit (Spectrum)

[Posted November 30, 2010 by corbet]

IEEE Spectrum discovers the joy of hackable devices using the Canon Hack Development Kit. "Most camera traps use an infrared motion detector, but a CHDK-enhanced camera can itself detect motion. Van Barel's script gives you control of such things as the delay between the motion and the shot and whether the focus is fixed or variable. Without any tuning at all of the script's parameters, I was able to get some fascinating photos of birds cavorting around the family bird feeder. Others have used similar scripts to produce some stunning photographs of lightning."

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Posted Dec 1, 2010 6:53 UTC (Wed) by alison (✭ supporter ✭, #63752) [Link]

See also the Stanford-Nokia Fcam program which runs on the Nokia N900 Gnu/Linux camera:

FCamera, our N900 demo application that lets you have full manual
control of the N900, supports RAW capture, and does HDR viewfinding.

FCamera is built using FCam:

FCam is an open-source C++ API for easy and precise control of digital
cameras. It allows full low-level control of all camera parameters on a
per-frame basis, making it easy to rewrite the camera's autofocus routine,
to capture a burst of images all with different parameters, and to
synchronize the operation of the camera lens and flash with all of the above.

Claimer: I work for Nokia.

Using the Canon Hack Development Kit (Spectrum)

Posted Dec 2, 2010 7:11 UTC (Thu) by freddyh (subscriber, #21133) [Link]

Great development. I wish things like that were available for SLR users as well (and not only limited to Canon).

While the examples are great, considered they are taken with a compact camera, most examples are easy to do with an SLR... imagine what one could do with a custom firmware in an SLR :)

Using the Canon Hack Development Kit (Spectrum)

Posted Dec 3, 2010 12:07 UTC (Fri) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

Well, for some Canon SLRs there exists the Magic Lantern Firmware. But all this really should not require hacking your firmware.

Using the Canon Hack Development Kit (Spectrum)

Posted Dec 3, 2010 12:59 UTC (Fri) by freddyh (subscriber, #21133) [Link]

I agree: every piece of equipment that depends on software should come with the source, the devkit and ideally a description of how to boot new software.
Unfortunately that's not entirely the case.

Magic Lantern doesn't help me: I intentionally wrote: "and not only limited to Canon" ;)