Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

srsa_4c

4450

Re: Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

« Reply #150 on: 27 / February / 2014, 19:24:51 »

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According to the circuit diagrams I've seen (G6, 400D), the terminals of the hot shoe are connected to an undocumented flash controller circuit, which - in case of the G6 - is an SPI bus device. If they are still using this hardware setup, that would make reverse engineering even more difficult.

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ahull

Re: Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

« Reply #151 on: 28 / February / 2014, 06:48:00 »

Sniffing SPI sounds like a job for a BusPirate... if you dont want to splash the cash on the real thing, there are plenty of copies from the usual sources on ebay.. but they are not that much cheaper.

The one I picked up at the tail end of last year was £14.95 (around $24.00 US), but that supplier has stopped selling them.

Since for the purposes of this job, the bus pirate is basically an Arduino clone, you could probably adapt one of those to do the same job.

« Last Edit: 28 / February / 2014, 06:55:24 by ahull »

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Recyclojunk64

Re: Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

« Reply #152 on: 03 / March / 2014, 10:28:48 »

Thanks for all the info and ideas. I'll probably get myself a bus-pirate, they do indeed look quite useful and I do need a JTAG programmer anyway. Any idea of whereabouts the G6 diagram can be found? If the flash controller in the SX40 turns out to be similar (I haven't looked at it yet actually; unless it's on the mainboard) I might get a cheap G6 to play around with so I don't risk breaking the other SX40

Since this will be an ongoing project I'll probably move to another thread

« Last Edit: 03 / March / 2014, 10:31:29 by Recyclojunk64 »

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ahull

Re: Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

« Reply #153 on: 03 / March / 2014, 13:54:10 »

Quote from: Recyclojunk64 on 03 / March / 2014, 10:28:48

Thanks for all the info and ideas. I'll probably get myself a bus-pirate, they do indeed look quite useful and I do need a JTAG programmer anyway. Any idea of whereabouts the G6 diagram can be found? If the flash controller in the SX40 turns out to be similar (I haven't looked at it yet actually; unless it's on the mainboard) I might get a cheap G6 to play around with so I don't risk breaking the other SX40

Since this will be an ongoing project I'll probably move to another thread

They are pretty useful, although I would caution that their jtag abilities are limited, and somewhat slow, great for hacking, but if you need to do a lot of jtag work, professionally, then you might need to spend a bit more on your jtag equipment. Unbricking a router or sniffing round a GPS unit, or indeed a camera jtag port should be "do-able", debugging large numbers of board on an assembly line.. probably not.

The bus pirate makes quite a neat (if somewhat low speed) logic sniffer too (you can even use it as an oscilloscope of sorts), obviously since they are avr based, you 'aint going to be watching GHz signals, or voltages above logic levels, but for serial comms and any logic levels up to a few MHz (tens of KHz for the oscilloscope function) they are perfect.

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srsa_4c

4450

Re: Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

« Reply #154 on: 03 / March / 2014, 16:00:07 »

Quote from: Recyclojunk64 on 03 / March / 2014, 10:28:48

Any idea of whereabouts the G6 diagram can be found?

Try elektrotanya [dot] com, scroll down to the search bar, enter powershot for example.
Note that the G6 runs DOS, so CHDK will not help. Unfortunately, SMs for DIGIC III (and newer) cameras no longer contain schematic diagrams...

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Karmaschinken

Re: Battery third (temp) terminal as multipurpose analogue input

« Reply #155 on: 15 / March / 2014, 16:30:25 »

Hello girls and guys and betweens...

I once promised to publish a modified GUI of CHDKPTP which shows the implementation of reyalp's ingenious multicam.lua. I hope I can come up with this in the second half of april.

I am still working very hard to make all the rig work, but I think next week it will be ready to use. Still all the cable aren't housed, still the software is buggy and hot, but it looks good all in all. I have two light barriers working now, two wireless switches for triggering, flash integration and several delay curves adjustable directly from the CHDKPTP. The images are automatically downloade, stabilized, truned into animated GIFs, MP4 video and several JPG outputs, then all this automatically uploaded into the web together with a wrapping web page. I think the rig is very rich of features now. Still no long-time test is run, bit I hope it will turn out good.

However, it is time to thanks you all once again and over and over for you help. I promise I will put my part back into here as soon as I have my rig working and the time to integrate the multicam.lua into the CHDKPTP GUI, to demonstrate how it is used together with the GUI.

Meanwhile you may want to have a look at some impressions of my work building the rig here: Click me! Have a nice time!

« Last Edit: 15 / March / 2014, 16:32:40 by Karmaschinken »

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