Friday, April 15, 2011

Canon G11 Remote Capture (CHDK)


Introductions:

This is a little bit article to investigate how we can change a Canon G series features,since Canon Company had stopped supporting the remote triggering of its Powershot G series a lot of of hobbyist, hackers and enthusiast are finding ways to resolve this issues or on the other hand their efforts are to indigenously improve and extend their cameras' shooting capabilities.

In our case ,since there are 2(two) available pairs of G11 in the laboratory and want them to be used in book scanning , hence a remote triggered must be one of its features and so the solutions is to look for an alternative hard coded software that will bypass Canon camera firmware and therefore extends its features in some ways.

Well,I have these ideas in mind:

(One)Get the latest CHDK for G11 that supports USB/PTP or (Two)Load the alternative firmwares SDM scripts; then on the PC side use the gphoto2 and Gambas2 would intervene the whole process (as plugging ON and OFF the USB) .And instead of a mechanical switch I'll try to use micro-controller interface to USB for a camera access while in the process upload a captured images in the SD Card .

I have some reference to follow.
Good article for remote capture using CHDK /SDM (by: Tom Horsley)
http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/hardware/scanner/software.html
CHDK site
gphoto2 site
SDM site
well again lets include gambas2


Requirements:
Camera Version Finder
http://savedonthe.net/download/247/CameraVersion13-sfx.html
CHDK firmware port to G11 version 100l.
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=4647.510

SDM
Gphoto2
Gambas2


Objectives:

1) Extended G11 (Canon Powershot G series) extended its shooting mode features and capabilities
2) Get G11in RoBook Scanning task.

Methodology:

1) Get SD Card
Note:
If the card is 2GB you can partition it directly , however when the capacity is much larger you can partition it into two , the other space is for booting while the other one is for CHDK files.
1.1) root@localhost # df -h
1.2) root@localhost # yum install gparted

2) Click " Applications" menu
2.1) Click System Tools
2.2) Click gparted
2.3) Enter your root password

3) Formatting SD card 2GB partition into FAT16

4) Make the SD Card bootable

5)For Auto-loading the CHDK scripts lock the SD Card

6) Insert the SD Card in the Camera then turn ON

7) You will see the image appearing as shown in "Detail(5)".

8) Debugging the USB/PTP script(at our own risk!)

Detail(1):Camera Version With G11 capture photos


Detail(2):Camera Version Finder


Detail(3) Generated camera version from an image files


Detail(4) Gparted partitioning SD Card


Detail(5) : Card Trick FAT16 format on SD Card


Detail(6) Formatting card into FAT16


Detail(7) Canon G11 is now Hacked!


Remarks:

As I've mentioned a while ago , I have two ideas in mind :
The first is the USB/PTP encoded in CHDK but need to wait first for the hacking release ,Yet a Canon SX200IS had the code ported already so possible for the Canon G11 also.Whatever, the other method plugging in /out or switching ON/OFF will be much more easier to accomplished for now compared to the latter method(we'll see if there's a ported code already for G11).


Conclusions:
Still on going