Thanks Devon. Next stop amazon.com...
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I have a theory about the power issue which may be common to all cams with no manual focus (based on zero knowledge of how any of this works):
1) assume that there is one stepper motor to drive both the zoom mechanism and the focus mechanism
2) assume that there is a solenoid, that gets activated and pushes against a spring, to engage the motor gear to the focus mechanism, for brief moments of focus for every shot (using a lot of power, but, controlled by canon fw developers, to only be activated for a short time)
3) my theory is that the code snippet that CHDK calls to set focus, activates the solenoid but doesn't release it, since, the release solenoid code is somewhere in the canon zoom routine code (perhaps to add a small delay before releasing)
Something like:
void canon_set_focus_code(int focusVal) {
turnOn_focusSolenoid();
turnMotorTo(focusVal);
//theory is that set focus code returns without releasing the focus solenoid
}
void canon_set_zoom_code(int zoomVal) {
turnMotorTo(zoomVal)
focusVal=determineRequiredFocusSetting();
canon_set_focus_code(focusVal);
turnOff_focusSolenoid(); //<<< theory is that release of focus solenoid is here instead of above
}
I did install chdk-shell and attempted to figure out whether this theory had any merit with my current SD500 cam but ran out of energy when I discovered that the disassembled camera code is not included with the environment (at least I couldn't find it, but did find the binary file via the SD500 page, but not disassembled).