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Closed Digital Cameras - Does Anyone Care?
Karamchand asks: "Free Software and open standards are ubiquitous in the server and even desktop area. But why does nobody seem to care about openness in digital cameras? I couldn't find a single hint as to what main processor my camera uses (I guess many use ARMs and others use TI DSPs), and while searching for information about (re-)programming digital cameras, I had to give up (apart from the scriptable Digita OS which was used by some discontinued cameras by Kodak, HP et al). Do you know of any efforts in this direction, whether they are actual disassembling/programming of cameras or asking vendors to get more open?" I still have my Kodak DIGITA-based camera from several years ago and I loved the flexibility, even though the performance is poor by today's standards (long cycle times, poor battery life, etc). Why are digital camera manufacturers keeping the lid on the capabilities of their products, when digital cameras could be so much more than their film-based counterparts?
I don't care how my digicam does it, as long as the files are available to me in a format that I can use.
.jpgs and .avis that I can get via a USB cable. It makes no difference to me how they end up on the flash memory device.
My visioneer camera gives me
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The Canon Digital Rebel (a/k/a 300D) is in many ways a crippled version of the Canon 10D. A Russian hacker developed a version of the firmware that unlocks much of the hidden potential of this camera.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Here's the main info page that gives an English overview of all the hacked features: http://www.bahneman.com/liem/photos/tricks/digital -rebel-tricks.html
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Unfortunately, Verizon neuters the Bluetooth capabilities of their phones to force you into using their for-pay services to send pictures and get programs/ringtones, etc.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Personally, I like to have a nice, working, manufacturer supported camera more than I like having a 1337 LEENOOKS-2000 fuzzy image device. But then, I also stopped using Gimp and Linux in favor of Mac and Photoshop, so flame on.
I really hope the parent was tongue-in-cheek. In terms of a modern digital camera, my DiMAGE A2:
1. Turn it into a temporary USB data storage device if it has a USB port on it
Check.
2. If it has audio capability, turn it into a digital audio recorder that works kind of like a mini-cassette recorder (ie. shitty quality, but lots of record time)
Check. The video function works fine for this, and if you leave the lens cap on, the black-frame video takes up almost no space.
3. Make it into a "cam" that can be attached to your PC for live web cam stuff
Check.
4. Turn it into a video recorder for short clips in a format like MJPEG
Check. You have, y'know, used a digital camera, right? MJPEG's been the main video capture format for years, only now being supplanted with MPEG4.
7. Set it up for motion sensitive mode. It will span a picture only when something in the field of view moves
8. Or similar to above, in motion sensitive mode with USB, it could just dump the image straight to your PC whenever there is motion. Imagine combining this with a laptop to work as a spycam...
Check, check.
That said:
5. Make it into an e-book reader that can read PDF or Postscript docs (after all many digital cameras have scroll wheels and multiple menu buttons, etc...)
6. Play some old school video games on them: Space Invaders, Pac Man, maybe even Doom. Doom's been done before...
9. MP3 or Ogg Vobis player the works from CD or Flash media (again if your camera has audio capability)
10. A USB video monitor. Combine your camera with a Mac Mini and a foldup KB and mouse and you have a pretty compact but powerful system for travelling. (Yes, I don't mind squinting at small screens)
The fascination people have with putting Ogg/DOOM/eBooks on random objects amuses the hell out of me. I have a Vorbis player on my iPaq, and an eBook reader on my iPod, and never use either of them. As for porting games...oi. I recommend a GameBoy.
In response to the original poster, my camera's a MIPS, according to my firmware disassembly. Here's something I'm amazed nobody has mentioned:
My camera's firmware contains a TCP stack, PPP implementation, SMTP implementation, and dinky FTP server. It's pretty clear that the manufacturer intends (or intended) to release a modem of some sort. Yet, nobody seems to have mentioned network connectivity!
As an embedded systems engineer, I'll tell you why:
1) The firmware is highly hardware dependant. You will not be porting this to any other hardware, you won't use it anywhere else. It is of little use to anyone not using your same PCB.
2) There is proprietary, licensed software included, that cannot be redistributed. Particularly the following:
(a) The focus control software (this is the DSP software that figures out when the image is in focus).
(b) The CCD filtering software.
(c) The OS, if any, may be licensed from a third party.
3) There is no way to interface to these devices without a proprietary hardware device costing possibly thousands of Dollars. For example, a common camera chip is the TI DSC24, which can be reprogrammed via a specific JTAG emulator, and requires TI's Code Composer Studio compiler to develop for the DSP part of it. Even if you had this stuff, you won't find a JTAG header on the production boards. This is not a Tivo hack, the number of people that would be able to actually apply a hack to this device is limited to the people who can solder a JTAG interface, or desolder the flash and reprogram it on a flash programmer. This means that even if one guy in Norway can do something cool with this camera, he can't share it with the world.
On the Nikon D70 for example there are even 2 different firmwares you can update. Does anyone know which 2 processors are used in the D70? I understand one is used for the user interface and the other for the signal processing(DSP)
So no technical reason to stop us disassembling the code (lateste update for example) and make some changes or extensions and reprogram your camera.
With an JTAG connection debugging would be way easier. Although, we might be able to use the USB port for feeding debuging data back to a PC.
The only real problem I see, is if you really mess up the firmware, you might block the possibility to reprogram the firmware and you end up with a non functional camera...
In the case of the D70 we could start with the DSP only, assuming the other processor can still reprogram the firmware in case of an 'accident'.
- Canon D30/D60/10D/20D: 8086 microcontroller running ROM-DOS
- Canon 1D/1Ds: PowerPC running VxWorks
- Canon 1D/1Ds Mark II: ARM running VxWorks
- Canon Powershot Sxxx/Axxx cameras: MIPS, some may use ARM.
- Nikon D-SLRs (D2X, D2H, D100, D70): Fujitsu FR-V, running FR/OS (some FR-V chips run Linux too!)
- Nikon Coolpix cameras: SPARC, uses Sierra OEM toolkit
- Sigma/Foveon SD10/SD20: ARM, running Foveon toolkit on custom FPGA