But, when I click any of the "shoot-mode" buttons, the camera seems to lose connection.
Do you mean in the ptpcamgui UI, or physically on the camera? Just to be clear, you should be using the ui (or switch_mode_usb(1) in lua)
Also, when I do "luar shoot()", ptpcam is just sitting there, waiting for a response.
You must be in record mode before you use shoot, so if you can't get into record mode, this won't work.
To me, it almost seems that the camera is physically incapable of shooting when connected trough usb. Is this the case?
Unlikely it's physically incapable, but there might be bugs which prevent it from working. If you haven't already, it would be a good idea to search the forum and see if other users have had problems with PTP on this particular camera. I have a really vague memory someone else reported problems with PTP on this camera, but I haven't found post confirming it so I may well be mistaken.
I have to confess tough that I'm running ptpcam on windows xp on a virtual machine on my mac, but because the lua commands seem to work I don't really think that that's the issue.
Agree, if basic lua works then this probably shouldn't be an issue. You might want to stress test it with some uploads and downloads or something, just to make sure it isn't failing intermittently or going down after some period of time.
If there are any tricks needed to get this working from a VM, that might be of interest to other users on the forum.
The reason I want to use chdk is to control a large amount of (preferably cheap) cameras. I have to be able to let them take pictures and then download them trough USB. Does anyone know of any other cheap canon that let's me to this with chdk?
In general, it should work on any complete CHDK port, but it's possible that individual cameras have problems. There's no way for the CHDK developers to test every camera, so you have to rely on what's reported by other users on the forum.
You can look in the PTP development thread
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=4338.930 and chdkptp development thread
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=6231.270 to find some specific models others have used successful.
I believe the a810 is cheap, currently available and has been reported to work. I don't personally own this camera though.
Note that getting everything to work reliably may involve quite a bit of effort on your part, especially if you want all the cameras controlled by the same computer.
