It's Over 256

One of the bugs that was bugging me for a while now, has been squashed! Miss aligned zebra now finally shows the correct over and underexposed regions.

Now, colors on the other hand ...

Buffers and Pointers

One of the last buffer addresses traced down! Fast motion detection now works. Although using a stand might improve results here.

More Data per Picture

Saving RAW images works! For comparison (top->down): RAW photo, JPG produced by camera, manually manipulated RAW photo.

P.S. Photo taken at night with 15 second exposure on ISO 400.

Thousand Words

One of the first pictures taken under CHDK using Ultra Intervalometer script. A lot of things are still buggy, but the grunt work is done!

Press Any Key

Keyboard working! Now the CHDK menu can be finally accessed. Games and calendar work, but needs more work to be able to take photos.

Wear and Tear

Recompiled and reloaded the SD card, while debugging the firmware so many times, it fell apart.

Blue Joined the Party

Drained the battery on the red camera. Time to break out the blue one! For even wear and tear.

Keep Alive Ping

Not dead, just busy!

Boot to the Screen

Boot splash & On Screen Display with debug info. Forums can be useful!

Pixel Counting

Just counting pixels, nothing to see here.

Ghost in the Camera

Something is trying to show up. Still not sure if the init task actually gets executed.

Needle in a Heystack

When you're looking for a needle in a 2.022.184 line "haystack", you better make some "tools" that do the looking for you first!

It Lives Some More

Some progress, managed to boot the camera software trough CHDK firmware. Next stop, implementing hooks in the code to extend functionality!

It Lives

First successful boot of the CHDK firmware! A lit LED, at least the compiler works and the encryption of the boot-loader isn't a problem.

CHDK Hacking

The cameras are new. So new, that the CHDK hasn't been ported onto them yet, which presents a challenge to dive in to the world of firmware dumping, reverse engineering, assembly parsing and cross platform coding.
So, step one of the project: build a cross platform ARM tool-chain, check out source from the CHDK project, dump the camera firmware, disassemble it, poke around the assembly for "clues" and create a functioning port.
More on this in the porting thread of the CHDK forum.

Buy Hardware to Build Hardware

For this project a pair of A2200 Canon cameras will be used. Choice for them was made because they are light, cheap, have a 14 MP sensor, can shoot 720p (HD) video and come in red & blue colors.

But most importantly, since this is Canon (and that is why we love them for it), they can be used with an third-party firmware called CHDK (Canon Hacking Development Kit), granting full control over the cameras including running scripts on them and controlling them remotely trough a computer.

Goals and Conditions

Educational project aimed at utilising and expanding existing knowledge and acquiring new skills.
Goals for this project:

• expand knowledge of photography
• acquire knowledge of photogrammetry
• hardware hacking (build a 3D camera)
• hardware programming (port and use CHDK) on the camera
• use acquired knowledge to generate topography data from areal view
• use acquired knowledge for telemetry processing
• figure out what else is needed to make this project successful
• optional: expand knowledge of avionics

Conditions for success:

• acquiring any new and beneficial skill or knowledge
• creating a 3D camera rig from off the shelf components
• acquire areal photographs from build camera rig
• creating software for processing data from build camera rig
• optional: build drone to carry the camera rig
• optional: camera rig and/or flying contraption spontaneously combusts or disappears in a hole of space and time

Achieving any of these conditions, and the project will be considered time well spent. As from now on, anything goes!

Prolog

Time to expand the knowledge gained by the previous project (alreon) with a clean slate.