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Will CHDK work for what I need?

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Offline jmonty

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Will CHDK work for what I need?
« on: 22 / July / 2011, 16:38:09 »
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I'm part of a lab doing research with aerial imagery with small (low-cost) UAV's. We need a camera and software that will support remote capturing plus downloading the pictures via the USB interface to an in-flight computer.

Previously we've accomplished this with PowerShot SX110's and gphoto, but there are less and less point-and-shoot cameras that are supported by gphoto anymore.

I've done some searching around on this wiki and forum, and it looks like CHDK does support remote capturing over USB, so that is good. My question is then can the pictures that are captured remotely then be grabbed off the camera to the on-board flight computer via the USB port? I saw some stuff about ptpcam and looked up the libptp library. Does CHDK support that functionality?

Also, can the settings for ISO, white balance, aperture and all that be set over the USB port?

We are looking at getting a couple S95's to work with if this can all be done. Thanks for any help you all can offer.
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Offline thepanoguy

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #1 on: 22 / July / 2011, 21:04:02 »
Take a look at the Eye-Fi cards. Some people on this forum have reported success.

http://www.eye.fi/

Farther information:

CHDK Wiki:

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

CHDK download:

http://mighty-hoernsche.de/

SDM may also be useful:

http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/sdm/index.htm

The gurus on this site should be able to answer the technical questions.



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Offline reyalp

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #2 on: 22 / July / 2011, 22:24:15 »
Quote from: jmonty on 22 / July / 2011, 16:38:09
I've done some searching around on this wiki and forum, and it looks like CHDK does support remote capturing over USB, so that is good. My question is then can the pictures that are captured remotely then be grabbed off the camera to the on-board flight computer via the USB port? I saw some stuff about ptpcam and looked up the libptp library. Does CHDK support that functionality?
CHDK has it's own custom PTP protocol extension. If your flight computer is running some flavor of linux (or windows, but I'm guessing not), compatible clients are available. Non x86 hosts might require some hacking.

See http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/PTP_Extension
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Also, can the settings for ISO, white balance, aperture and all that be set over the USB port?
The CHDK PTP protocol does almost everything with CHDK lua scripts. This means that any setting or action which is available through script is also available over PTP.  That includes ISO and exposure settings. I think you can set the standard white balance modes using property cases: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/PropertyCase

Custom white balance is not exposed to scripting at the moment.

You can also send key presses to the canon firmware.
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Offline jmonty

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #3 on: 12 / August / 2011, 16:04:21 »
Quote from: reyalp on 22 / July / 2011, 22:24:15
CHDK has it's own custom PTP protocol extension. If your flight computer is running some flavor of linux (or windows, but I'm guessing not), compatible clients are available. Non x86 hosts might require some hacking.

See http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/PTP_Extension
Excellent! My lab now has a Poweshot S95 and I've got CHDK loaded on it successfully. At first glance, the PTP Extension looks pretty heavy. I assume I'll have to use one of those client programs on the wiki page to talk to the camera, correct? What would you recommend for an Ubuntu system?

Also, I have no prior experience with CHDK or scripting for it. Is there maybe a quickstart guide or something that I can refer to? Or could you point me towards an example of how to go about remotely capturing an image and then just getting it to the computer?

Thank you much for the help!
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Offline reyalp

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #4 on: 13 / August / 2011, 01:37:30 »
Quote from: jmonty on 12 / August / 2011, 16:04:21
I assume I'll have to use one of those client programs on the wiki page to talk to the camera, correct? What would you recommend for an Ubuntu system?
I have built and used ptpcam (from the chdkde tree http://tools.assembla.com/chdkde/browser/trunk/tools/ptpcam ) and my chdkptp client ( http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/chdkptp) on ubuntu.

I'm biased, but I'd think the PC side scripting ability of chdkptp would be useful in this application. However, you should be aware that it's in an alpha state and I haven't had a lot of time to work on it recently. The basic script interface is usable, but there are a lot of loose ends.
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Also, I have no prior experience with CHDK or scripting for it. Is there maybe a quickstart guide or something that I can refer to? Or could you point me towards an example of how to go about remotely capturing an image and then just getting it to the computer?
What documentation there is can be found on the wiki. Unfortunately, it is incomplete and not terribly well organized. A lot of useful stuff can also be found in the forum. http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Scripts is a good place to start for general scripting stuff.

This thread http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=6355.0 has some discussion (a few pages in) of scripted shooting and downloading from chdkptp (along with a lot of debugging and other diversions that won't be relevant to you...)
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Offline jmonty

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #5 on: 18 / August / 2011, 14:50:49 »
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Offline reyalp

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #6 on: 18 / August / 2011, 23:56:04 »
It looks like CHDK_SRC_DIR isn't pointing to a place where CHDKs core/php.h can be found.

You can get it here http://tools.assembla.com/chdk/browser/trunk/core/ptp.h

Note that the include looks for core/ptp.h so you'll need to put it in a directory called core and set CHDK_SRC_DIR to point that the directory which contains it.
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Offline jmonty

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Re: Will CHDK work for what I need?
« Reply #7 on: 20 / August / 2011, 01:03:38 »
Quote from: reyalp on 18 / August / 2011, 23:56:04
You can get it here http://tools.assembla.com/chdk/browser/trunk/core/ptp.h
Thank you, I knew there needed to be a core/ptp.h there, I just thought it was the ptp.h in that trunk/ directory. Thank you for clearing that up. I'll start poking around with that and post back here if I have any questions.
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