Hi Vance. I got your PM, but figured I might as well reply to everything hiere.
I did buy this board directly from Canon.
Do you mind sharing how you bought it (what part of Canon you contacted, if you have to be a camera dealer or something), and what you paid ? I wouldn't have expected them to sell a bare board to anyone but their service reps, and I'm sure some of the community would be interested.
Do you have the option of returning it ? If you just want a camera, not a hacking adventure, I'd suggest returning it for a refund and getting a G12. If you do want a hacking adventure, read on...
I simply called Canon Parts USA and said I wanted to buy the main PCB board for a G11. They asked the part numbmer, I read it off the part I had removed (clearly damaged in the camera). They quoted me $93. I gave them a CC number. The board showed up at my door.
Just disassembling the camera wasn't all that hard. I do the same sort of thing with audio equipment all the time...but with the audio gear...I typically don't have to worry about the entire programming side of things. I'm not a programmer at all (other than object oriented visual programming for audio and video systems...very basic stuff). My hope had been that simply finding out what I broke when I dropped the camera and replacing it would do the trick. But it sounds from your description that there is a lot more that I might have to deal with to get this camera back up and running. I'm especially concerned about the adjustment table.
I think what I will do is keep the new board in the camera, reassemble it, and send it to Canon repair who have a flat labor charge of $149. Hopefully they can get it up and running. I cannot return the board, but if Canon repairs it, they would need to charge me for a new board anyway....so I figure I'm not out all that much for the part.
I love a good DIY project, but I have about 30 here at the house which could end up advancing my personal work and my new business...whereas this camera project was just to save a few bucks and learn a thing or two. Looks like THAT didn't work out as planned: I learned there's more to it than I want to deal with.
I may still eventually get a G12, but not till CHDK runs on it! I gotta have my intervalometer!
Thank you VERY much for your help in all of this.
Regarding clearing factory mode:
It should be quite easy. All I had to do was call the
Even procedure called ClearFactoryMode(). To do this, you will need
- CHDK bootable SD card, as described in
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Bootable_SD_card- A custom build of CHDK hard coded to call this eventproc somewhere in startup (you could technically do this with lua, but you'd need to build a custom CHDK to do that anyway) I would suggest simply finding the event proc address, and calling it directly from CreateTask_spytask. I don't remember exactly where I called it when I recovered my cam, but I think it was near the start of spytask somewhere. Whims gui may help you make a build
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=845.0- This leads to another problem: there are several known G11 firmwares, which need different CHDK builds. You could try them all, or do some LED debugging to figure out which it is.
Note that my camera was a Digic II/VxWorks camera so there is definitely no guarantee yours will be the same. However, the same eventproc still exists in new cameras.
If you don't have the programming ability to do the above, or would like some tips one on the code, some folks here might be willing to help you. I'm frequently in the IRC channel (#CHDK on freenode) in the evenings US Pacific time.
There are some things you should consider:
- Is your camera in factory mode, or is it a blank ROM with just a bootloader ? My guess is if there is only the boot loader, it will NOT show up on USB, while in factory mode it should show up with DCP Connect. If it is in blank ROM, your chances of getting a working camera are much lower, but some experiments on a camera in this sate could be very valuable to the CHDK community. It may be possible to load firmware code from a firmware dump, but this will take some serious hacking, and have a high chance of completely bricking the board. Doing the procedure to clear factory mode on a camera in this state will probably do no harm, it should crash very early in the boot process.
- If your camera is in factory mode and you manage to clear it, your problems aren't necessarily over. As I mentioned before, there is some factory configuration required if you replace major components. Replacing the board means ALL adjustments have to be performed, unless you figure out how to transfer them from the old cameras ROM. Each camera has an "adjustment table" stored in ROM, and that should be set for your specific camera.
You will probably not be able to do this without Canon service software and some additional hardware, and the camera may not work at all without it, or may perform poorly. If you can find a factory service manual for a digic II or later camera (google), you can get an idea of whats involved. Pre-digic II manuals are easy to find, but not applicable.
Some people have done board transplants successfully without this adjustment, but a board that had never been initialized might be different, even if it has the ROM code on it.
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