LCD screen control - Script Writing - CHDK Forum

LCD screen control

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LCD screen control
« on: 06 / January / 2011, 08:44:31 »
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Hi,

I'm totally new to CHDK. I purchased a SX30IS just two days ago (actually CHDK was the deciding factor in choosing the Canon; I had been agonizing for ages between it and a Finepix HS10). I've successfully loaded philmoz's port for the SX30IS, beta 10, and started to play around a bit. It's awesome what possibilities open up! I hope Canon realizes what an attraction CHDK is and that it will help them sell more cameras.

Anyway, one idea that I would like to implement in some way is to use the LCD panel as a countdown indicator when doing time-lapse photography. In some cases it's useful for the operator to be able to see (from some distance) exactly when the camera is about to take a picture. Now, the SX30IS has a nice swivelling LCD display which can be angled in almost any direction. It would be ideal for the purpose.

However, after reading the scripting tutorials it appears to me that the only way to put anything on the screen from a script is to use the print command, which will output lines of text to the console. That is of course not useful for my intended purpose. I want to be able to make the entire LCD uniformly black, white, or any other color.

Can someone please tell me if my impression is correct? Or is there, in fact, a way to control the entire LCD via a script?

Re: LCD screen control
« Reply #1 on: 06 / January / 2011, 09:59:58 »
one idea that I would like to implement in some way is to use the LCD panel as a countdown indicator when doing time-lapse photography

Hello and welcome.

That is a standard feature of SDM time-lapse.
The characters are larger than normal.

In 'endless' shooting mode it displays number of photos taken rather than those remaining to be taken.
It also indicates how many more photos will fit on the card and how long it will take to capture those photos.

The SX30 has not yet been ported to SDM.


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Offline fudgey

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Re: LCD screen control
« Reply #2 on: 06 / January / 2011, 10:13:27 »
Can someone please tell me if my impression is correct? Or is there, in fact, a way to control the entire LCD via a script?

Without added C code, I believe your options are limited to blinking the LCD backlight and to resizing the script console using set_console_layout and print different characters (such as #'s or spaces for white or dark) to fill the screen with different levels of white (or print huge numbers, woudn't really be that hard to draw manually from a script).

Re: LCD screen control
« Reply #3 on: 06 / January / 2011, 11:10:00 »
Without added C code, I believe your options are limited to blinking the LCD backlight and to resizing the script console using set_console_layout and print different characters (such as #'s or spaces for white or dark) to fill the screen with different levels of white (or print huge numbers, woudn't really be that hard to draw manually from a script).

Thanks for the replies.
I think fudgey's suggestion of blinking the backlight and/or outputting oversized characters might go quite a ways in the direction of what I'm looking for. I'll experiment and see how it turns out.

 

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