Help making CHDK and the forum better - page 6 - General Help and Assistance on using CHDK stable releases - CHDK Forum
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Help making CHDK and the forum better

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Offline dlw

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #50 on: 25 / January / 2009, 12:19:20 »
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Quote from: lrossel on 23 / November / 2008, 15:34:07
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Maybe is a good Idea to divide this CHDK User Manual in parts, like:RAW.txt, Zebra.txt, OSD.txt.... in order to have smallest books more readable.

If I had one complaint about the wiki & the forum it would be that there is just too much information in it.  :)  I decided I needed an in-camera manual as soon as I got CHDK working -- before I stumbled on this post and found lrossel had done it!  My work took a different direction:  I've made a series of small files -- one for each <Alt> menu.

In each file, I show the menu names in upper case to make them easy to find when you're scrolling through the screens of text.  A zipped archive of my current draft is attached.  It's still a draft because I'm going option-by-option through the menus, trying everything on my G9.  There are a bunch of menu entries I haven't found or written text for, and a few that I haven't gotten to do anything, but it looks like I should be finished in a month or so.

 I offer this mostly so you can see whether this multiple-file format would be useful to the community -- I have no desire to compete, just to support and make the CHDK autobuild better.  If you think this is valuable, it might be good to ask the community for suggestions to improve content and format.  I don't know how to do this -- any advice?

Thanks.

EDIT:  the attached file is obsolete.  See next post for ALTMENGD.ZIP
« Last Edit: 09 / February / 2009, 09:39:44 by dlw »
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Offline dlw

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #51 on: 09 / February / 2009, 09:38:15 »
Folks,

Here is a guide to the CHDK <Alt> Menu.  It doesn't pretend to be a full users manual, but it does discuss every menu entry that I could find.  The attached zip is a collection of small text files, intended and formatted for in-camera viewing -- there is one file for each menu and sub-menu to minimize scrolling through a lot of text to get to the entry you want to view.  There is also an index of lowest-level entries to their parent menu and to the text file that describes them.

This set of files supersedes the preliminary set (called UserGuide.zip) in my 25 January post.

In the time it took to put this together, CHDK went from rev 686 to 706.  That's great work by the developers, but it makes documenters run to keep up.  This document set is good through rev 701 -- the changelog doesn't show any later changes that would make it obsolete.

Please take the time to try these out in your camera (perhaps storing the whole set in CHDK/BOOKS/ALTMENGD).  I'd welcome comments, corrections, suggestions -- I'd like to make this accurate for all cameras.  Maybe if enough people think this is a good presentation, it'll be added to the autobuild.

Thanks for your time.

UPDATE 4/8/09:  Version 1 was downloaded 21 times.
Version 1.1 (in sync with CHDKv0.9.7r727) is in the zip file below.
« Last Edit: 08 / April / 2009, 13:29:08 by dlw »
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Offline Gimzim

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #52 on: 20 / August / 2009, 01:25:14 »
It looks like it's been a little while since anyone's posted in this thread, but I think the intentions to improve CHDK and the forum are still here, so I'll give some of my thoughts.

1. This is a pretty minor thing, but some of the Forum titles are excessively long. In particular, I'm talking about "Hello, I'm a NEWBIE - HELP!! (Newbies assistance, User Guides and thank you notes)" which could be shortened to, say, "Newbie assistance." Or even "New user help" (since I don't really like the word newb or n00b, but that's a different story). There are a few other titles that could be shortened also. This would just cut down on the clutter, which can detract a lot from the experience of using any website.

2. The initial instructions on how to set up CHDK could be more streamlined. I can explain this in more detail later, but I think that when I was reading about it the first time, I had to go to at least 2 different instruction pages, and go back and forth between them to make sure I didn't miss anything. It wasn't hard to figure out, but it just took some more time, and for some people that can be a bigger problem than for others. It really isn't that hard to install CHDK, so why make it a little harder when you don't need to?

Please don't take these suggestions as complaints. I hope they're helpful. I'm offering them in the spirit of improvement, and I'll contribute as I have time.
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Offline HarpoMa

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #53 on: 20 / August / 2009, 06:36:41 »
I find the "search" often doesn't.  I usually end up needing to go to advanced search before any hits are found.  This probably causes lots of noob questions since they cannot find the answers by the default search.
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Canon Models - SD300, SD780, & SX210
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Offline Gimzim

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #54 on: 20 / August / 2009, 14:21:50 »
I think one reason it can be hard to find answers using search is that they are often located in threads with a different topic. Sometimes it might be better to start a dedicated thread for a question, so it's easier for others to find.
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Offline CanonBlue

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #55 on: 23 / February / 2012, 14:35:14 »
Is it possible to use one card to boot up the chdk on more than one camera model? I think it is currently impossible because you have to have one file named Diskboot and if you renamed one of them to Diskboot2 the camera wouldn't recognize it? But if it were possible to do that, it would be pretty cool. I'd love to be able to set up all the memory cards in the house to work with the chdk on all the different cameras we have (each person in my family has a different camera, some are different models and some are the same model but different firmware versions). It would also be convenient for traveling with two cameras. But of course its not a critical feature since memory cards are getting so cheap.
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I use the chdk on my SX230 and SD1100 cameras, and I installed them using a Macbook, currently running 10.6.8.
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Offline outslider

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #56 on: 23 / February / 2012, 17:08:20 »
unfortunately this is the Canon limitation (reading DISKBOOT.BIN file). So CHDK can't help much here. The only possibility that comes to my mind is to have one 8GB card with two 4GB partitions and CHDK for different cameras on different partition. This way you can load CHDK on one camera and when you decide to use it on other camera you'd swap partition using CHDK menu. Then you'll able to run CHDK from the same cart (but the second partition) on the second camera. And do the same to back to the first one.

This is not very usefull idea, in my opinion even worse than dedicated card for each camera, but this is possible...

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While I war writing above I realized, that there is another, better way. Just put DISKBOOTS on camera and name them e.g as follows:

DISKBOOT.BIN
DISKBOOT.BIN_B
DISKBOOT.BIN_C

Then you are able to run CHDK only on camera, let say 'A'. To use CHDK on camera 'B' you can use 'rename' option from CHDK file browser and change DISKBOOT.BIN to DISKBOOT.BIN_A and DISKBOOT.BIN_B to DISKBOOT.BIN. And the same for other cases. You could even write a script that does this for you :)
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Offline CanonBlue

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Re: Help making CHDK and the forum better
« Reply #57 on: 23 / February / 2012, 21:20:20 »
I agree that sounds like more hassle than its worth. I was thinking it would be cool if a card could autoboot any chdk for any camera, but having to switch partitions and everything is definitely more complicated than just using different cards. Cool concept though.
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I use the chdk on my SX230 and SD1100 cameras, and I installed them using a Macbook, currently running 10.6.8.
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