Is anyone trying to dump the firmware for A430 at the moment? I would like to try but I'm not very good with electronics so building the sensor might be too big a task for me.
See this page
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/A430 it appears there is somebody working on it but they haven't published a dump yet.
Also, with current knowledge of the firmwares, would it be possible to build a "blinker" firmware that dumps the firmware straight to SD card?
There are a few direct writing dumpers out there (but the sources of these are no longer available or weren't available), the biggest problem is that you need to know where the SD card writing functions are and without a dump so you're stuck in a chicken-and-egg scenario.
The only other option you've got is to write your own SD card writing functions, which requires knowing details of the SD card hardware which are only really available by analysing a dump.
In short, the reason the blinker dumpers are the most common is that they are significantly simpler (and quicker to develop) than SD card dumpers.
