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Improved Startup / Shortcut issues

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Offline lemongrass

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Improved Startup / Shortcut issues
« on: 22 / August / 2009, 09:46:50 »
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I took my Canon SX110 with CHDK on vacation recently and found two issues to be very annoying:

1) Improved Camera Startup

I couldn't decide whether to activate CHDK autostart (SDCard lock) or not because there are a lot of situations when fast camera startup is neccessary, for expample if you are driving in a car and have to get the camera ready very fast if you see something interesting along the way. In this case you only want to press the power button and not the play button, wait till CHDK loads and then press the shutter button to put the camera in record mode. On the other hand having to load CHDK manually every other time becomes annoying too.

My suggestion: At least on those models which have seperate power and play buttons (not one power button and one record/play switch like A510 etc.), if CHDK autostart (SDCard lock) is enabled then pressing the power button should put the camera immediately into record mode without loading CHDK (maybe it's possible to keep the "Update Firmware" entry in the play menu so that you can still load CHDK later if you need to without having to shut down your camera?); pressing the play button should load CHDK and put the camera in play mode.


2) Shortcuts

There is a conflict between the "CANON AF-Lock shortcut" Shutter_Half + Left, which can be used to switch from autofocus to manual focus with the distance set to the last autofocus distance, and the CHDK zebra mode shortcut. So with CHDK loaded but not in ALT mode, every time you use "CANON AF-Lock shortcut", zebra gets (de-)activated as well. 

Another issue is the "CHDK Raw shortcut" pressing Erase while in ALT mode. With CHDK loaded, using scripts and deleting pictures, it happened quite a few times to me that I accidentally enabled the RAW mode, filling my memory card with .crw files.

My suggestion: the user should be able to choose which CHDK shortcuts he wants to activate, at least those shortcuts that are used in non-ALT mode and potentially conflict with CANON shortcuts.
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Offline reyalp

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Re: Improved Startup / Shortcut issues
« Reply #1 on: 22 / August / 2009, 17:52:54 »
Quote from: lemongrass on 22 / August / 2009, 09:46:50
My suggestion: At least on those models which have seperate power and play buttons (not one power button and one record/play switch like A510 etc.), if CHDK autostart (SDCard lock) is enabled then pressing the power button should put the camera immediately into record mode without loading CHDK (maybe it's possible to keep the "Update Firmware" entry in the play menu so that you can still load CHDK later if you need to without having to shut down your camera?); pressing the play button should load CHDK and put the camera in play mode.
You should be able to start in record mode by holding the power button down a little bit longer. The reason for this is CHDK cannot know which button was used to start the camera, because by the time it is loaded, the button has been released. The canon ROM loads the CHDK image over the same memory where the canon firmware variables were, so we couldn't even salvage it from there. We could perhaps create option for it to start in record mode by default, and only start in play mode if you had play held down or something ?

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There is a conflict between the "CANON AF-Lock shortcut" Shutter_Half + Left, which can be used to switch from autofocus to manual focus with the distance set to the last autofocus distance, and the CHDK zebra mode shortcut. So with CHDK loaded but not in ALT mode, every time you use "CANON AF-Lock shortcut", zebra gets (de-)activated as well. 
AFAIK it was mentioned in the development thread that the buttons should be mapped differently (they were based on the SX10, which doesn't actually have the same button layout). I'm waiting for a patch that implements this, since I don't actually have the camera to see what makes sense.
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Offline lemongrass

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Re: Improved Startup / Shortcut issues
« Reply #2 on: 24 / August / 2009, 15:02:03 »
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You should be able to start in record mode by holding the power button down a little bit longer.

Thx, I didn't know that.

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We could perhaps create option for it to start in record mode by default, and only start in play mode if you had play held down or something ?

If this decreases the time until the camera is ready to take a picture, I think it would be a good idea.

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AFAIK it was mentioned in the development thread that the buttons should be mapped differently (they were based on the SX10, which doesn't actually have the same button layout). I'm waiting for a patch that implements this, since I don't actually have the camera to see what makes sense.

I just scanned the manual and the SX110 CANON FW seems to use two "1/2 + ButtonX" shortcuts:

"1/2 + Left"  for AFLock and
"1/2 + Erase" for AELock

So these buttons shouldn't be used for CHDK shortcuts.


By the way, these are the CHDK shortcuts I found out on my camera:

"1/2 + Left" : Toggle Zebra
"1/2 + Down" : Toggle Histogram
"1/2 + Right" : Toggle OSD
"1/2 + Up" : no effect

Maybe Zebra could be mapped to "1/2 + Up" since that button is not used right now.
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Offline lemongrass

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Re: Improved Startup / Shortcut issues
« Reply #3 on: 24 / August / 2009, 15:16:35 »
1) I assume it is not possible then to start the camera without CHDK in record mode and still have the "Update Firmware" entry available when you go to the CANON menu later?

2) There is one small bug in the "Bracketing in Continuous Mode" menu. "Bracketing Type" does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do: "+" decreases shutter time (each picture darker then the previous one), "-" increases shutter time. Or is it a feature  :D
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Offline fudgey

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Re: Improved Startup / Shortcut issues
« Reply #4 on: 24 / August / 2009, 15:27:20 »
Quote from: lemongrass on 24 / August / 2009, 15:16:35
1) I assume it is not possible then to start the camera without CHDK in record mode and still have the "Update Firmware" entry available when you go to the CANON menu later?

On my a570 this firmware update menu item is available in PLAY mode if and only of lens is in (i.e. either right after powering up to play mode or if I've been in REC mode, the item reappears after power saving timeout has retracted the lens) but never when lens is out.

Quote from: lemongrass on 24 / August / 2009, 15:16:35
2) There is one small bug in the "Bracketing in Continuous Mode" menu. "Bracketing Type" does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do: "+" decreases shutter time (each picture darker then the previous one), "-" increases shutter time. Or is it a feature  :D

Yes, well...this one is a known "feature". There hasn't been a vote but I and the previous person who reported it as a bug agree that it should be the other way around ;)  I'm hesitant to change it until the whole thing gets reworked (no, I don't think anoone's working on that), because there are a lot of people who now remember which way it works and they could get confused if it was changed.
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Offline reyalp

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Re: Improved Startup / Shortcut issues
« Reply #5 on: 24 / August / 2009, 17:15:28 »
Quote from: lemongrass on 24 / August / 2009, 15:02:03
If this decreases the time until the camera is ready to take a picture, I think it would be a good idea.
Not compared to holding the button down. The vast majority of the startup time is actually loading the image and rebooting the camera.

Quote from: lemongrass on 24 / August / 2009, 15:16:35
1) I assume it is not possible then to start the camera without CHDK in record mode and still have the "Update Firmware" entry available when you go to the CANON menu later?
Right, CHDK can't change how the camera behaves when CHDK isn't loaded. Doing this would require modifying the on-board flash, and the general consensus is that CHDK should never do this, due to the risk of bricked cameras and voided warranties.
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